Human
Kindness Found in all Groups
Viktor Frankl (1905-1997) was a
connoisseur of Nazi concentration camps, having been a guest at four of
them over five years. His report on how good and evil really work is
called Man's Search for Meaning,
which sold nine million copies in 24 languages:
"Our
generation is realistic, for we have come to know man as he really is.
After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of
Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas
chambers upright, with the Lord's Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his
lips.
"...
it must be stated that even among the guards there were some who took
pity on us. I shall only mention the commander of the camp from which I
was liberated. It was found after the liberation – only the
camp doctor, a prisoner himself, had known of it previously –
that this man had paid no small sum of money from his own pocket in
order to purchase medicines for his prisoners from the nearest market
town.
"(An
interesting incident with reference to this SS commander is in regard
to the attitudes toward him of some of his Jewish prisoners. At the end
of the war when the American troops liberated the prisoners from our
camp, three young Hungarian Jews hid this commander in the Bavarian
woods. Then they went to the commandant of the American Forces who was
very eager to capture this SS commander and they said they would tell
him where he was but only under certain conditions: the American
commander must promise that absolutely no harm would come to this man.
After a while, the American officer finally promised these young Jews
that the SS commander when taken into captivity would be kept safe from
harm. Not only did the American officer keep his promise but, as a
matter of fact, the former SS commander of this concentration camp was
in a sense restored to his command, for he supervised the collection of
clothing among the nearby Bavarian villages, and its distribution to
all of us who at that time still wore the clothes we had inherited from
other inmates of Camp Auschwitz who were not as fortunate as we, having
been sent to the gas chamber immediately upon their arrival at the
railway station.)
"But
the senior camp warden, a prisoner himself, was harder than any of the
SS guards. He beat the other prisoners at every slightest opportunity,
while the camp commander, to my knowledge, never once lifted his hand
against any of us.
"It
is apparent that the mere knowledge that a man was either a camp guard
or a prisoner tells us almost nothing. Human
kindness can be found in all groups, even those which as a whole it
would be easy to condemn. The
boundaries between groups overlapped and we
must not try to simplify matters by saying that these men were angels
and those were devils.
Certainly, it was a considerable achievement for a guard or foreman to
be kind to the prisoners in spite of all the camps influences, and, on
the other hand, the baseness of a prisoner who treated his own
companions badly was exceptionally contemptible. Obviously the
prisoners found the lack of character in such men especially upsetting,
while they were profoundly moved by the smallest kindness received from
any of the guards. I remember how one day a foreman secretly gave me a
piece of bread which I knew he must have saved from his breakfast
ration. It was far more than the small piece of bread which moved me to
tears at that time. It was the human "something" which this man also
gave to me – the word and look which accompanied the gift.
"From
all this we may learn that there are two races of men in this world,
but only these two the "race" of the decent man and the
"race" of the indecent man. Both are found everywhere; they penetrate
into all groups of society. No group consists entirely of decent or
indecent people. In this sense, no group is of "pure race"
and therefore one occasionally found a decent fellow among the camp
guards.
"Life
in a concentration camp tore open the human soul and exposed its
depths. Is it surprising that in those depths we again found only human
qualities which in their very nature were a mixture of good and evil?
The rift dividing good and evil, which goes through all human beings,
reaches into the lowest depths and becomes apparent even on the bottom
of the abyss which is laid open by the concentration camp.
Was Frankl suggesting an alternate interpretation of a recent
declaration?
Regarding
the Germans who Just Went Along
"But
my point," [Frankl] continued, "is that heroism ultimately can only be
demanded or expected of someone - of only one person. You are never
entitled to place the demand of heroism on any one else, not unless you
have been in the same position, facing the same decision, the same way
facing death as punishment. But anyone who had immigrated to the United
States and, viewing the situation in the past from that place, is not
entitled to tell anybody who had remained in Germany that he should
have joined the resistance, unless he himself has done so, facing all
the risks, facing the question of whether his responsibility toward his
whole family had allowed him, because he would have thrown his own
family into the concentration camps."
Al Solzhenitsyn Chimes In
Then there's the Alexander
Solzhenitsyn viewpoint,
troubling to absolutists because he's an even more famous concentration
camp survivor, in his native Russia.
"The
universal dividing line between good and evil runs not between
countries, not between nations, not between parties, not between
classes, not between good and bad men: the dividing line cuts across
nations and parties, shifting constantly. . . . It divides the heart of
every man."
"The
Pharisees, in an attempt to discredit Jesus, brought a woman charged
with adultery before him. Then they reminded Jesus that adultery was
punishable by stoning under Mosaic
law and challenged him to judge
the woman so that they might then accuse him of disobeying the law.
Jesus thought for a moment and then replied, "He that is without sin
among you, let him cast the first stone at her." The people crowded
around him were so touched by their own consciences that they departed.
When Jesus found himself alone with the woman, he asked her who were
her accusers. She replied, “No man, lord.” Jesus
then said, "Neither do I condemn thee: go and sin no more." "For
the world is in a bad state, but everything will become still worse
unless each of us does his best. So let us be alert – alert
in a twofold sense:
Since
Auschwitz we know what man is capable of.
And since Hiroshima we know what is at stake."
9:32:12 PM 
|
