Derek asked:

I have watched the Movie 'The Grey Zone' about the Sonderkomandos in the concentration camps
during World War II. There is one question that stands out from all the others: What is the destiny of
mankind when horrors and man's inhumanity to man still exists today?

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If you are asking for a prediction I can't give you one, and given what is important in your question is
the issues it forces us to confront it is probably best that I cannot.

What are these issues? Let me try to unpack them. I haven't seen the film, but I believe the phrase
'The Grey Zone' originates with Holocaust survivor Primo Levi, it's a chapter title from his book The
Drowned and the Saved,a chapter concerned with the Sonderkommandos (SK) or the Jewish groups
who maintained the death camps, who while themselves prisoners were 'responsible' for the running
of the ovens and gas chambers. Responsible is in scare quotes here because for Levi these Jews
represent the crossing over into the grey zone, where our need and our ability to judge falters. Can
we even ascribe responsibility to these people? Certainly they would have been killed if they refused
but then they were killed anyway (so that they would not be able testify as to what had occurred) So
why did they do what they did? why didn't they rebel, or face death rather than collaborate with the
Nazis? Surely they were criminals just as much as the Nazis were.

Conceiving and organising the squads was however, according to Levi National Socialism's most
demonic crime. This institution represented an attempt to shift on to others — specifically the victims
— the burden of guilt, so that they were deprived of even the solace of innocence. The Grey Zone
has subtle and shifting borders, such that ordinary black and white concepts of right and wrong fail to
apply, to such an extent that Levi tells us: I believe that no one is authorised to judge them, not those
who lived through the experience of the Lagerand even less those who did not live through it.

But maybe the implications of the possibility of the SK are more worrying than placing us in a grey
zone of moral judgement, in the face of the desolation of the holocaust maybe a revolution in our
thought is called for:

"The Holocaust demands interrogation and calls everything into question. Traditional ideas and
acquired values, philosophical systems and social theories all must be revised in the shadow of
Birkenau. Novelists and politicians, poets and moralists, theologians and scholars all feel compelled
to examine their consciences with regard to the holocaust. Not to do so would mean to live a lie.

Elie Wiesel"

That's the demand we are confronted with at the gates of the death camps: that Auschwitz and
Birkenau could happen means that they can happen again, and they are more likely to happen, if
things carry on in the same way they did before the holocaust. Of course, as you recognise the horror
is still with us, genocides repeat themselves and with it repeat the demand of Auschwitz: Not to let
this happen again. Maybe we are not trying hard enough to follow this new categorical imperative (
T.W. Adorno's phrase).

Given the fact that we keep repeating our mistakes, refusing to learn from the demand of Auschwitz
may lead you to conclude that the destiny of mankind is to destroy itself. But this would be still to
remain within the mode of thinking that we need to overcome. That is, if by destiny you mean some
determinate history, some necessary outcome of human affairs, and a predictable conclusion. For
this kind of thinking this idea of destiny is what drove (under various guises) the perpetrators of the
twentieth century worst atrocities.

The Holocaust calls into question the sense of destiny; there are no longer any certainties. Further
respecting the demand of Auschwitz i.e. rethinking our ways of talking about the world, of space and
time, of interacting, of treating other people, of writing, of organising society, means that we cannot
predict what will be the outcome. Right now we cannot say what a post-holocaust thinking would be.
Auschwitz has shown us that anything can happen, and we have to be prepared for that. (This is one
reason why I can't offer a prediction.)

Although exactly how we can be prepared for the unexpected seems like a contradiction, maybe
that's just the kind of situation we find ourselves in after Auschwitz: to be alert, wakeful or to maintain
what Levinas (an important thinker on these questions) calls an absolute insomnia toward a future
which is completely unpredictable.

Levinas has argued that a person has an infinite responsibility to an other person, that is to whoever
happens to come along. When faced with this Other I am obliged to help to give the Other what ever
(s)he needs. Of course part of the risk in this ethic of absolute insomnia is that after Auschwitz, I can
never be sure what the other is. After Auschwitz it is no longer possible to tell the difference between
gods and monsters anything can happen but this time that's another reason why I can't offer a
prediction, but what ever happens, this time we cannot escape our responsibility for it.

Brian Tee