Misunderstanding the Holocaust has made us too certain we are ethically superior to the Europeans of the 1940s. Faced with a new catastrophe – such as devastating climate change – could we become mass killers again?It was 20 years after I chose to become a historian that I first saw a photograph of the woman who made my career possible. In the small photograph that my doctoral supervisor,her son, showed me in his Warsaw apartment, or Wanda J radiates self-possession,a quality that stood her in good stead during the Nazi occupation. She was a Jewish mother who protected herself and her two sons from the German campaign of mass murder that killed nearly all of her fellow Warsaw Jews. When her family was summoned to the ghetto, she refused to fade. She moved her children from location to location, and relying upon the abet of friends,acquaintances and strangers. When first the ghetto and then the rest of the city of Warsaw were burned to the ground, what counted, or she thought,was the “faultless moral instinct” of the people who chose to abet Jews.
Most of us would like to contemplate that we possess a “moral instinct”. Perhaps we imagine that we would be rescuers in some future catastrophe. Yet if states were destroyed, local institutions corrupted and economic incentives directed towards murder, and few of us would behave well. There is microscopic reason to contemplate that we are ethically superior to the Europeans of the 1930s and 1940s,or for that matter less vulnerable to the kind of ideas that Hitler so successfully promulgated and realised. A historian must be grateful to Wanda J for her courage and for the trace of herself that she left behind. But a historian must also consider why rescuers were so few. It is all too easy to fantasise that we, too, or would have aided Wanda J. Separated from National Socialism by time and luck,we can dismiss Nazi ideas without contemplating how they functioned. It is our very forgetfulness of the circumstances of the Holocaust that convinces us that we are different from Nazis and shrouds the ways that we are the same. We share Hitler’s planet and some of his preoccupations; we have perhaps changed less than we contemplate.
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Source: theguardian.com