Sam Smith
The
60th anniversary observance of Auschwitz brings back a question
that periodically lurks in the corner: how much do we really learn
from evil?
It is widely assumed in this
country that humanity is significantly improved by such things as
Holocaust studies, international war crimes, and showing teens scary
films about driving. There is, however, far more faith than evidence
about all this.
This is not to say that such matters should not
be an part of the human curriculum, only that in American culture they
are approached with a zeal that borders on moral pornography and, in the
process, overwhelms the far more important matter of learning and
practicing alternatives to that which we are meant to avoid. It is
almost as though we were constantly being given directions by naming all
the streets we shouldn't use without ever being told the ones we
should.
I learned about Auschwitz in 1956, on the eleventh
anniversary of its liberation. It was at the tail end of Soc Sci 2,
taught by intense, red-headed liberal Samuel Beer, who covered six
revolutions -- including the French, industrial and Nazi -- with
enthusiasm for real people and events. Each revolution required a two
thousand word paper. The climax of the course led us from Nietzsche to
Hitler to an evening of Nazi propaganda films and footage of
concentration camps liberated just a decade earlier. The concentration
camps were gruesome, but the movies the Nazis had made to celebrate
themselves were in some ways even more horrific, depicting as they did
millions of Germans voluntarily surrendering their souls as millions of
others were involuntarily losing their lives. In one of the films, the
frame was almost entirely filled with an overhead shot of Nazi soldiers.
One thin corridor cut through the dark mass and down it walked three
tiny figures -- Adolph Hitler and two aides.
What we saw had been
placed in history's context; we had been taught not just brutal endings
but far more instructive beginnings, and we got to see not just evil's
horror but its accompanying banality.
What I didn't realize,
however, was that college students all over America weren't learning the
same thing and that when they did, it would have acquired a name, and a
politics, and a semiotics, and it would have become multiple worlds
inhabited by victims, philosophers, journalists, politicians, leaches,
symbol snatchers, propagandists, self-servers and deniers. And that
people like Sharon and Bush would do new evil in the name of exorcising
the old. I had learned about the Holocaust before it became whatever
anyone wanted it to be.
By the time I graduated, I had read
William Shirer's new book, The Rise and the Fall of the Third Reich, and
found myself absorbed not so much in what the Nazis had become but how
they had begun - how normal, how ordinary so much of it had been, with
that frighteningly familiar mix of opportunism, lust, incompetence, and
failure of courage at a time when something still could be done. If they
had let me build the Holocaust museum that would have been its prime
exhibit: not what had happened, but how.
Years later I read
Martin Mayer's book, They Thought They Were Free, based on interviews
with ordinary Nazis before and after the war. In it, this Chicago Jewish
reporter summed up:
"Now I see a little better how Nazism
overcame Germany. . . It was what most Germans wanted -- or, under
pressure of combined reality and illusion, came to want. They wanted it;
they got it; and they liked it. I came back home a little afraid for my
country, afraid of what it might want, and get, and like, under
pressure of combined reality and illusions. I felt -- and feel -- that
it was not German Man that I had met, but Man. He happened to be in
Germany under certain conditions. He might be here, under certain
conditions. He might, under certain conditions, be I."
Here is
the part of the Holocaust that is most frequently denied. Not that
millions were slaughtered but that those who did the deed might under
certain conditions be either you or I. And we would do it, as Adolph
Eichmann had suggested, simply by finding the right words for it, what
he called 'office talk.'
It is this unrecognized, undiscussed
denial, especially at moments of solemn observance, that most frightens
me. And our recovery does not lie in still more talk, ceremonies, and
professions of horror. It lies instead in the study, honor, and practice
of the good and the decent.
If you watch good people closely,
their good comes as naturally as evil came to Eichmann. It does not have
to be propped up with memories of great wrongs; it is just the everyday
unconscious behavior of those graced with honor: the banality of
decency.
We need perhaps a museum of the good, curricula in
decency studies, and practice in their skills and rhythms. We need peace
experts instead of military experts talking about Iraq on Fox TV. We
need mediators instead of just lawyers on Court TV. We need movies, and
heroes, and moving stories that win Academy Awards and models for our
children that lead them to the contentment of cooperation and fairness
rather than to brutal examples drawn from the play-by-play of violence
and wrong that appears with every other click of the zapper.
Even
our memories and mourning of the wrong can be directed toward the
better. Do we only regret or do we reconstitute ourselves and our
community, creating a soul and a place where we don't even have to
imagine something like that happening again? Too often, confronted with
past great horror, we not only mourn the victims, we join them in
unconscious capitulation to the presumed inevitability of the evil.
The
frightening thing about Auschwitz is not that some would deny it but
how real it still seems. The frightening thing about Auschwitz is that
our leaders go to honor it while still denying Guantanamo and Al Graib
and Palestine. We will know that we have finally learned the Holocaust's
lessons when we no longer hear new echoes of it.
