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Nov. 11, 2005
Morality during Holocaust
Good and evil coexist in humans, says Kristallnacht lecturer.
PAT JOHNSON
The perpetrators of evil, such as those who carried out the Nazi
regime's war on the Jews, are often discounted as foreign or inhuman
– inherently evil and therefore different from ourselves. But
this distancing of evil from the realm of our own lives and experiences
can deflect the necessary lesson of the Shoah, which is to analyze
the presence of hatred and potential evil in ordinary people.
This was one of the messages brought to Vancouver last Sunday by
Prof. David Engel, a New York University historian who delivered
Vancouver's annual Kristallnacht Commemorative Lecture.
To demonstrate the complexity of moral choices in the Holocaust,
Engel told the story of Calek Perechodnik, a Jewish collaborator
with the Nazis, who left behind a complex and nuanced 600-page testimony
of his horrific relationship with evil.
Before he died in 1943, Perechodnik penned a massive mea culpa,
outlining the decisions and circumstances that led him to join the
ghetto police in his small Polish town – a decision that ultimately
resulted in him delivering into the hands of the Nazis most of his
townsfolk, including his wife and two-year-old daughter.
After the war, the manuscript made its way to the agency that was
responsible for assembling material on the Holocaust and initial
efforts were made to edit it for publication.
But the book wasn't published then, Engel explained, because the
moral complexity – the intermingling of co-operation with evil
and the banality of ordinary people caught in extraordinary circumstances
– was probably too nuanced for a reading audience that was
determined to find in the emerging literature of the Holocaust only
the binary alternatives of saintly victimhood or absolute evil.
The manuscript languished until the 1990s, when a Polish translation
was issued under the title Am I a Murderer? Engel was asked
to review the book for an academic journal and coincidentally discovered
a similar book, in Hebrew, titled The Sad Task of the Chronicler.
Comparing the two versions, Engel found discrepancies that could
not be a matter of mere translation.
Engel told a rapt audience at Beth Israel Sunday of his quest to
unravel the mystery of the two versions. It turns out that the Jewish
Historical Commission, which had been entrusted with the original
manuscript, engaged in a comprehensive rewriting of the text in
the late 1940s, erasing the humanity of Perechodnik and recasting
the author as a being "worthy only of opprobrium," according
to Engel. Eventually, Engel himself would edit a revised version
of the manuscript and publish the definitive text under the title
Confession.
The lesson of Perechodnik's life (and literary afterlife) is evidence
of the human need to segregate ourselves from the evil in the world,
Engel posited. While there was no shortage of evil at work in the
time of the Third Reich, and there were also many people whose choices
were altruistic and life-affirming, there were, Engel reminded the
audience, a large number of people whose experiences do not fit
into that easy categorization.
Holocaust education is intended, in part, to prevent such atrocities
from occurring again by identifying and confronting evil, whether
it appears in the extreme and obvious forms of Nazism, or as a less
evident, banal part of ordinary people's choices and circumstance.
Understanding and acknowledging the potential for evil in otherwise
humane individuals is necessary to understanding the past, Engel
said.
The annual Kristallnacht Commemorative Lecture marks the anniversary
of the Night of Broken Glass, Nov. 9-10, 1938. In just a few hours,
hundreds of synagogues across Germany were burned, almost 100 Jews
were killed, 30,000 were arrested and Jewish businesses and homes
were destroyed. The event is seen as the beginning in earnest of
the Holocaust.
Pat Johnson is editor of MVOX Multicultural Digest, www.mvox.ca.
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