On Immoral Reason and Illogical Morality

Summary

During the war I learned the truth we usually choose to leave unsaid: that the cruellest thing about cruelty is that it dehumanises its victims before it destroys them. And that the hardest of struggles is to remain human in inhuman conditions.

There is a story from Sobibor: fourteen inmates tried to escape. In a matter of hours they were all caught and brought to the assembly square to confront the rest of the prisoners. There, they were told: ‘In a moment you will die, of course. But before you do, each of you will choose his companion in death’. They said: ‘Never!’. ‘If you refuse’ said the commandant, quietly, ‘I'll do the selection for you. Only I will choose fifty, not fourteen’. He did not have to carry out his threat.

In Lanzmann’ s Shoah a survivor of the successful escape from Treblinka remembers that when the inflow of the gas-chambers’ fodder slowed down, members of the Sonderkommando had their food rations withdrawn and since they were no longer useful, were threatened with extermination. Their prospects of survival brightened when new Jewish populations were rounded up and loaded into trains destined for Treblinka.

Again in Lanzmann's film, a former Sonderkommando member, now a Tel-Aviv barber, reminisces how - shaving hair of the victims for German mattresses - he kept silent about the true purpose of the exercise and prodded his clients to move faster towards what they thought was a communal bath.

In the discussion intitiated by Tygodnik Powszechny, Jerzy Jastrzębowski recalls a story told by an older member of his family. The family offered to hide an old friend, aJ ew who looked Polish, but refused to do the same for his three sisters, who looked Jewish and spoke with a pronounced Jewish accent. Jastrzębowski comments: ‘Had the decision of my family been different, there were nine chances to one that we would be all shot. The probability that our friend and his sisters would survive in those conditions was perhaps smaller still. And yet the person telling me this family drama and repeating “What could we do, there was nothing we could do!”, did not look me in the eyes.