Susan Erony

SUSAN ERONY (born in Boston, Massachusetts, 1949; lives and works in Gloucester, Mass.)
Where in the World?
1999
Mixed media on canvas
66 x 58"
Courtesy of the artist

where in the world?
where in the world?

Photo: Alex Akselrod

Statement

"But the evil perpetrated, the incomprehensibility of human cruelty, the continued struggling of scholars to 'explain' and to make sense of the causative 'historical forces'–all appear to be quite universal. And the fact that 'ordinary men' were perpetrators of this evil should certainly provide useful insight into human behavior." (John Schlager)

All war histories may leave a legacy of questions, but that of the Holocaust and World War II seems a condensation of such. I cannot imagine what it would be like to be a soldier in war, let alone in one specifically targeting me, as a Jew, a subhuman creature mandating extermination. I have a basic concept, as an American child of the 1960s, of the possibilities of resistance and of a consideration for the humanity of others. But I cannot say what I would have done as a German soldier in the Wehrmacht in World War II. Would I have committed atrocities? Would I have done so as a 14th-century English knight or an American private in Korea or Vietnam? The more work, research, and teaching I have done on the history and legacy of the Holocaust and World War II, the more questioning I have experienced on the nature of good and evil, and on what is referred to as "human nature."

I am wary of dehistoricizing the Holocaust. Its legacy has profoundly affected my worldview and identification as a Jew. I rarely go through a day without at least an internal reference to it. But I no longer see the underlying issues as referring to Germans and Jews alone. It would be so much easier to isolate the capacity for evil of such an extreme performance to a category of antisemitism. But in fact, I am horrified too often by post- and pre-Holocaust human behavior. I cannot compare, nor do I wish or dare to, atrocities and genocides. "Where in the world did I ever get the idea that people were supposed to be good?" is a sentence that encapsulates the distillation of my knowledge into an emotional and psychological state of disillusionment. I have no explanation for the behavior of Wehrmacht soldiers in World War II, not any desire to rationalize it or the need of post-war German society to create heroes out of murderers. My question in this piece concerns my realization that to expect different behavior from societies and groups as they function in our world is unrealistic.