On Choosing the Good in the Face of Genocide
The extent to which children absorb the values of their parents and those significant peers and adults around them in contradistinction to the values they choose on their own is unknown. At some point we must choose to act or refrain from acting and be responsible not only for the choice but for the foreseeable consequences of that choice.
Reporting for work each day is a choice that, while it seems somewhat automatic for most employed workers, must be made each day. Some persons may feel trapped in their jobs, but they may consciously perceive that even this job is better than no job, and hence they choose to go to work on a regular basis. Workers enhance their perceived self-dignity when they experience a job well done. Individually and collectively persons discover the fruit of their creativity as it manifests itself in a common work project.
Much of the work that people do, however, is of questionable value to society as a whole and to individuals in particular. It is arguable that there is no line of employment and almost no moment of work in which a worker may maintain an altruistic moral code because the nature of any work site itself is flawed. Workers must make the project at hand the first priority and not the dignity of the workers themselves. Individuals are required to subordinate human dignity for the sake of a product or process that may or may not dignify the human.
Workers unwilling to cooperate in an enterprise of questionable value know that they can be replaced by other workers with similar skills and knowledge. Conclusions about their ultimate worth drawn from family or religious education are challenged at the most intimate level of their professional creative selves. The value of their paid labor is questionable because the worth of the self as worker is not clear. While they are still ostensibly free to challenge the objective worth of their employment and the intentions of their employers, workers may be persuaded that to do so would be to shift their identity from "worker" to "unemployed."
Objections become even more dangerous to raise during wartime. National as well as personal identity is at stake. In general, religious institutions support national goals, while unpopular radical minorities denounce national war efforts. Trusted elected leaders would not call the country to arms for an unworthy cause, the fearful ones reason. Patriotism requires temporary deferment of personal aspirations and ideologies. Job requirements intensify and become more focused on national security. Individual needs are increasingly subordinated to a highly touted vital national cause. Leaders must be trusted and workers must not interfere with the route to national security. Others will gladly take the jobs of the recalcitrant and support the patriotic front. Workers may question the wisdom of decisions, but they have precious little information with which to formulate an assessment of the morality of operations in the prevailing climate of national strain. Unusual protocols are always required in order to subdue the enemy. The line between "immoral" and "unusual" blurs.
Changes occur with amazing haste. What might have been unthinkable the previous year is quite routine at the moment. Eventual victory demands present sacrifice. Violence and the preparation for violence escalate. Workers become increasingly disconnected from themselves and their questions. Because both job and national security are so fragile, workers increase their reliance upon those who are poised to see farthest from the top. Workers, fearing for their safety, opt neither to ask themselves nor one another why the present course of action is to be considered the best alternative. Without access to official intelligence, their questions will not be addressed. Secrecy is necessary for national security; as are trust and compliance. So are ever increasing levels of violence and exploitation.
The choice for silence is made without serious reflection. Born of fear of oneself, one's comrades, and state authority, workers keep their own counsel. Acceptable conversation is necessarily light fare. Spies lurking about may overhear the equivocal conversations of the citizenry. Confusion is acceptable, but not disloyalty. One must squelch personal concerns about public policy. A successful war effort requires all hands. Everyone must act to eradicate the enemy during wartime.
Further problems arise when the enemy does not look loathsome. Workers are instructed to interpret the slaughter of defenseless human beings as good. National and local leadership attempt to persuade the people that the intrinsic value of their own humanity is somehow different from and dependent upon the destruction of other segments of the population. Dire consequences follow deviation from the national platform. Unspeakable horrors are reinterpreted. Hatred and torture are understood as necessary steps toward meeting national objectives. One must choose to support the war effort or risk losing everything. Ordinary persons find themselves doing the most extraordinary things.
Then something snaps. At the first hint of conscious objection to the magnitude of the evil surrounding them, workers take steps to quell their questions and divert their attention to something safe. One may argue that no one is obliged to die for another. Placing oneself and one's family at risk to save strangers exceeds the demands of human justice. Any moral obligation that we may have to resist evil stops short of requiring one's own death. Persons may not rightfully expect that others will die for them.
Still, there is that frightening after-thought lurking just far enough beyond consciousness: what if I had been brave enough to lay down my life so that others may live? Might the war have taken a different and less lethal turn if I and others had refused to be co-opted by intimidating bullies who coerced their weak and defenseless compatriots to betray their own humanity? Do ordinary citizens have a moral obligation to resist evil, even to the point of suffering their own death at the hand of governmental automatons who are themselves impotent in the face of the evil they create and perpetuate?
If one says no, there is no obligation to offer one's own life in service to strangers; then to what extent, if any, must one resist evil? And if to no extent at all, then what is that but a recipe for moral chaos? If one would place limits on one's obligation to resist evil, e.g., to include stopping short of giving one's life, then is one obliged to work to that point to resist an overwhelming evil such as genocide? To suggest such a limit would still potentially place oneself at considerable risk of mortal danger. At what point along the way to certain or even possible death may one retreat? If it is better to live than to die, may I live at the expense of the defenseless who have no alternative but to die at the hands of an evil regime? Is one required to be a martyr?
I propose that human beings are morally obliged to give their lives to save the life of another. This obligation is rooted in the core of our common humanity: I may not live at the expense of someone else. No one is finally expendable. If we were all to have our full capacity of moral courage, we would not stop before martyrdom. But if we all had such a dose of this courage there also would be no need for martyrdom in the face of evil. To fail to live up to this ideal is to fail our own humanity as well as those whose suffering is increased because of our cowardice.
The behavior of the complicitous cannot be condoned, but it must be understood. We are caught in an imperfect world, and we make it worse by our imperfect, nay, immoral choices. Sometimes people must pay for these choices with their lives. Human beings always choose the perceived good. Sometimes, however, we choose goods that are not good enough.
Moni McIntyre
Duquesne University
Italy, Jews and the Holocaust: A Case of Mass Civil Disobedience
In her well known monograph, Accounting for Genocide, Helen Fein seeks to explain the whys of the fate of Jews, country by country, that account for high and low percentages of victimization. Interestingly, a strong bibliography appended to the contrary, Professor Fein pays but scant attention to the Italian experience. Briefly put, of approximately 57,000 (not 40,000 as per Fine) Italian Jews, all but 7000 (not 10,000) survived; of the former, c.45,000 were Italians and c.12,000 were refugees.
Fein's study correctly stresses an unbroken thread of Papal antisemitism (a few pro-Jewish pronouncements kept discreetly unpublicized notwithstanding), but notes, also correctly, a wide range of acts of rescue, from inside the Vatican to hundreds by anonymous parish priests. On the whole, though, there is no accounting for the very low rate of antisemitism in the population at large, a phenomenon that still needs to be thoroughly researched.
As is quite well-known, despite the November 1938 anti-Jewish decrees issued by Mussolini's Fascist government, they remained just that, decrees, accompanied by less than enthusiastic administrative compliance. Until the collapse of the Italian government and the start of German occupation in September 1943, there were no roundups, and Jews lived relatively safely and unmolested. Large-scale arrests and deportations began only with the German take-over in autumn 1943. This, however, was met with an extraordinary grass-roots response by the Italian population that offered en masse shelters to Jews seeking to evade the lethal Nazi nets.
In no country was there such an impromptu outburst of citizen protection of Jews as in Italy. Betrayals (as in Ukraine or in Lithuania) were the exception; shelter in return for payment and extortion (as in Poland) were almost non-existent. The Italian spontaneity of mass solidarity is somewhat reminiscent of Denmark; but this case has been accounted for to the satisfaction of social scientists. The case of Italy awaits more searching historical analysis.
Far less known, but still an extension of the Italian phenomenon, is the humane behavior of the Italian military governments of occupation. Both in the eight departments in southeast France (that included Nice) seized from the Vichy regime and in the Dalmatian (Yugoslav) coastal zone, Jews found safe haven in these Italian-held enclaves. Despite repeated orders from Rome to comply with the agreement to turn over Jews to the Gestapo, the Italian military commanders steadfastly refused. Their motivations, however, are easy to fathom; a blend of patriotism, officer honor codes (Italian Jews had served with distinction), anti-Germanism, and upper-class contempt for Mussolini, as well as old fashioned decency account for their defiance of state authority. But these factors do not explain the across-the-board aid extended to Jews, to both Italian and foreign Jews, by the citizens of German-occupied Italy, from Rome to the Alps, a region where the Italian military no longer prevailed.
In large and small cities, in towns and villages, Jews were hidden. Not just in one place (as in Chambon, France), but all over. Townsfolk and peasants opened their homes, monasteries and villas. Professionals and simple people created a network of solidarity not prejudice, not to exclude Jews but to absorb them into the general population at large. The collaboration with Nazi policy by the functionaries of the Fascist puppet regime erected by the German in northern Italy was regrettable, but not typical of Italians; they were in the minority. In no major country within the extended European German zone of influence was there such a determined opposition to the Holocaust, not even in Bulgaria (which has been found inaccurately included in the short list of countries relatively free of rabid antisemitism and collaboration). It is Italy that stands out.
It is, therefore, all the more surprising that post-World War II Italian literature, especially that by Jewish writers, has virtually taken no cognizance of this extraordinary exceptionality. There is a strange silence by the absence of this theme. What accounts for this omission? What led to this myopia? What blinded the artists' eyes, given the rich anti-Fascist and introspective culture that blossomed after the war?
Primo Levi, that master of the fine detail, has little or nothing to say about this historic reality. True, he inhabited a world of total evil in Auschwitz, but he also returned to a world, an Italian world, that in large measure had redeemed itself, despite its Mussolini/Vatican leadership, unlike France (both occupied and Vichy). Nevertheless, he and his fellow writers seemed unimpressed by this mass display of civil disobedience, certainly not enough to probe it in depth and uncover its mystery. That task still remains to be done. It will require a Dante-like mind to escort us through this near-miracle of human decency that prevailed in Italy during the inferno that was the Holocaust.
No matter what its scope, evil should never crowd out human decency. Though Europe was in the grips of genocidal forces, they must not be allowed to dictate our perception of human nature. To ignore the Italian response to the Holocaust is to paint an inaccurate picture; to let it stand unexplored is to do an injustice to those aspects of human society that did not allow themselves to be thoroughly corrupted, despite the lack of example from their secular and spiritual leaders. The Italians case is ripe for teachers looking for examples of extraordinary social behavior during the Holocaust years.
Henry R. Huttenbach