Italian-Jewish chemist and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi wrote in his work The Drowned and the Saved about the Gray Zone, or holding place for all things difficult to categorize about his experiences in the Nazi camp Auschwitz. Because human tendency is to divide things in a rigid dichotomy, he argued, anything without a set role is brushed aside. I have extended this Gray Zone to include mutually shared situations from modern genocide including: the relationship of race/land to genocide, the Forced Victim-Perpetrator (victim forced to commit atrocities against his or her own people), and the complex international reaction to genocidal situations on individual and state levels. Understanding some of the common characteristics of the Gray Zones of modern genocide may help scholars and activists to keep the realistic view that genocide is not a confusing anomaly but an unfortunate pattern of human existence that must be understood and combated
