Gray Zone
Who: Primo Levi, prisoners who imitated, collaborated with, or assisted the Nazis in return for marginally better treatment for themselves or others. They include the kapos in Auschwitz who bullied and brutalized their fellow inmates, the Special Squads who performed the physical labor of the gas chambers and crematoria, the clerks and helpers and camp administrators and ghetto bosses. Their motives varied widely: "terror, ideological seduction, servile imitation of the victor, myopic desire for any power whatsoever, even though ridiculously circumscribed in space and time, cowardice, and, Finally, lucid calculation. . . . "
Where: The Drowned and the Saved
When: Takes place during WWII, written in the 1980s
Why: “The network inside the Lagers was not simple: it could not be reduced to the two blocs of victims and persecutors” “The enemy was all around but also inside, the “we” lost its limits, the contenders were not two, one could not discern a single frontier but rather many confused, perhaps innumerable frontiers, which stretched between each of us.”
Significance: see above