Today we visited the Jewish Museum of Berlin, a sharp-edged building that cuts harshly into the Berlin cityscape. Inside was a stark reminder of the systematic extermination of more than six-million Jews by the Third Reich. It’s a difficult thing to behold, to speak of the unspeakable, to know the unknowable ruin and destruction and attempt with our feeble minds to make some rational sense of it all. It’s a difficult thing not to be filled with rage and scorn, and perhaps that is indeed the correct way to react to such things, for at least in one’s convulsions and repulsions one knows 0ne is a human being.
But as I passed the relics of one atrocity after another, I found myself unconvinced by this manner of thinking. And I found myself pondering the most heretical of things: what if I had been born as a German, had lived in a world where the Nazi flag was flown? Would I have been the brave soul to break away and champion freedom and democracy? Would I have drawn the line somewhere? Or would it simply have been easier for a powerless soul as myself to comply, to aid, and perhaps to rejoice in acts of evil unspeakable? Anyone who can say with confidence that in such circumstances, he or she would have had the great moral fiber to draw an uncrossable line in the sand is a better person than me.
It’s easy to call the villains of history beasts, to call them animals unworthy of the bread we eat. But animals don’t systematically slaughter one another over abstract ideas. No, a holocaust is a decidedly human thing. For there are no such things as monsters. There are only people and the things we make. The human race has come a long way since the 1940s, but until we all realize that a man cannot ever be reduced to an beast, that no matter what good or evil he commits he is a human through and through, we risk thinking just like the Nazis did: categorizing, dehumanizing, cheapening death.
A man cannot be reduced to less than what he is. And it’s right to be afraid of such complexity. For it is a frightening thing.