Where there are no
men, be thou a man. — Rabbi Hillel
Toward the end of Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and
Warning, Timothy Snyder notes a small but important and surprising fact: some
of the heroic people who saved Jews during the Hitlerian Holocaust, were
anti-Semites.
Snyder notes that the Jews saved by
"righteous gentiles" speak very little of the motivation of their
saviors, and that the righteous gentiles speak of their motives just as little
or less. They usually dismiss what they did as just behaving
"normally," just doing what people do, or what any human being should
do. These good people, of course, were not
behaving normally, not in the statistical sense of "normal"; and in
terms of cold-blooded economic theory of rational actors pursuing self-interest;
they were not even behaving rationally.
In the midst of horrors, these
righteous few maintained what George Orwell called by the modest term
"decency"; they maintained Menschlichkeit
(Yiddish, Mentshlekhkeyt): where indecently few people
were acting like humane human beings, they remained human.
But not necessarily because they
liked Jews, and in these our sentimental days, when we want people to like
us, when attitude really counts — this is important.
Some of these quiet heroes saved
Jews on patriotic grounds: If the Germans wanted the Poles to deliver up their
Jews, to give the Germans the Jews in Poland for killing, a loyal Pole
resisted, even if he or she would just as soon have Jews out of Poland, and in
the 1930s had voted for political parties endorsing doing just that.
Some thought that murder is murder
and that it was their Christian duty to resist murder, even the murder of Jews.
For traditional Christian haters of Jews, Jews were people cursed as
Christ-killers; but Jews were still people, not subhuman as Nazis saw Slavs
(and Blacks), or, most relevantly, nonhumans, as orthodox Nazis saw Jews.
A fair number took very seriously
Jesus' Parable of the Good Samaritan, and saw it as their Christian duty to
help strangers in trouble. And some helped people they knew or a good-looking
Jewish girl they had a crush on or adopted babies or children because they had
lost their own or could use child labor on the farm.
And most Jews were not killed by
professional murderers at Auschwitz or the other death camps, but were shot by
more or less ordinary people, some of them very ordinary police officers, and a
fair number more or less indifferent to "the Jewish Question."
Anti-Semitism obviously had a role in the destruction of the Jews of Europe —
including anti-Semitism in England and the United States — but one could not
predict from the virulence of anti-Semitism in any given country just what
percentage of its Jews would survive the war, how many would be murdered.
As hinted at in the Stanley Milgram obedience experiments
and other work in social psychology, character and attitudes count, but not
always in straightforward ways or for a whole lot: context is important, and
"character" can be complex. One "moral" of Snyder's study
in Black Earth is that people who are indifferent to people like you, or
who even like your kind of folk might turn you in for extermination; people who
dislike "your kind" might know and like you personally and might save
you. Or people who don't particularly like you or your kind at all might save
you for all sorts of reasons, including a cold sense of duty or decency.
When the world moves into barbarism,
your friendly neighbor might betray you for a little extra food and your
apartment; Sister Attila the Nun, that cold-hearted horror, might give her life
to keep you alive.
People are strange, and in times and
places "Where there are no men" — where normal human behavior is
inhuman(e) — it is very difficult "be a man" in the sense of acting
humanely. And those who do the right thing will do so for a mixture of reasons
and some odd ones.
Those reasons may not include much
of their personal likes and dislikes, and they may even overpower a generic but
deep-seated hatred.
