POW internment accidentally saved Levinas’ life while his Lithuanian family was murdered

Evidence

Having moved to France before the war and acquired citizenship, Levinas had fought at the front and been captured when France fell. He was imprisoned in a unit reserved for Jewish prisoners of war in Stalag 11B, at Fallingbostel near Magdeburg. A harrowing five years followed, as he and his fellow inmates lived on watery soup and vegetable peelings while being worked to exhaustion chopping wood in the local forest. Their guards taunted them with the possibility that they might be shipped out to death camps at any moment. In fact, being in a POW camp probably saved Levinas’ life. It gave him a degree of formal protection that he would not have had as a Jewish civilian at large, although his wife and daughter did also stay alive by hiding in a monastery in France, with help from friends. Back in his native country of Lithuania, the rest of his family did not survive. After Lithuania was occupied by Germany in 1941, all Levinas’ relatives were confined to the ghetto with other Jews in their city, Kaunas. The Nazis assembled a large group one morning, among whom were Levinas’ father, mother and two brothers. They took them into the countryside, and machine-gunned them to death. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 623

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to Levinas’ philosophy of the ethical encounter with the Other — born from this wartime experience of utter exposure.
• QUESTION: Does Bakewell later connect Levinas’ wartime dehumanization to his concept of the ‘face of the Other’ as an ethical imperative?