What am I getting at?
I just saw this thing on the History channel that really repulsed me. It was an elderly holocaust survivor who was in the camps before his teens, he told a story of something that happened to him when he was 9 or 10.
He was sleeping on his slab (you can’t really call what the Nazis gave them as being beds) when he woke up to someone putting a hand over his mouth. Being in a concentration camp you would think that the danger, of course would have been from the guards. It wasn’t. It was another inmate who had jumped the boy (the entire time he is telling this story the old man is crying) naked, and had stradled him. He let lose his grip for a second so as to shove some food into the kid’s mouth. Hungry, he ate it and kept quiet for fear of his life. After it was over the guy left, but before doing so took the boy’s cap. Not showing up with your cap on was punishable by death from the Nazis, and the pedophile knew that, aparently trying to “cover his footsteps”. The frantic boy went through the barraks until he found another boy’s cap and took it. When formation came, he had to stand there and watch this other child executed because of the cap that he had stolen.
The Holocaust was horrible, but this pedophile… he got what he deserved, whatever that happened to be. I hope to God he didn’t survive, if there is any justice he ended up on Mengele’s (sp?) operating table.
WOW! i just spend 3 hours watching that BBC war docu-drama which focused on the same thing… and the various branches of the organization that killed the Jews… In one case a German soldier fell in love with a Jewish girl, but the girls younger siblings and older sister were ordered to be gassed… and the German was able to save the sister of this girl, but the children as a rule could never be saved because they were unfit for labor. The German told his superior that the sister was a worker and she was exempted from death just while she was going in to die.
Another section dealt with Himmler and how mad he was that SS officers were stealing Jewish personal effects and how he wanted to punish his own men for these acts.
Yep, disgusting.
Unfortunately, man’s inhumanity toward man is not limitted to some history show or isolated to the early 40’s. Both our history, and our news broadcasts are filled with it.
Yeah I remember watching some documentary in a humanities course about the Holocaust and it ends with something to the effect of “but does the monster really lie buried beneath these ruins [of cocentration camps], or does it lie within us all, dormant, waiting again to be unleashed?”
The thing that really sickened me about this is that this was done by an inmate, or “Holocaust victem”.
I am not a stupid man, I know that out of the 11 million people who died some Jeff Dalmers died right beside the Anne Frank’s. It is very comfortable for us to see black and white though. Nazis - evil. Holocaust victems - good. This story shatters that idea. I hate to say it any tortures this man recieved from the Nazis I see as justice. There is no hell he can go through that would be too harsh.
The Holocaust is as close as you can get to black and white. Good vs. Evil. But even to that extreme you can not paint with a broad brush who was evil and who was good. I admit, to the smallest percentile you can paint with that brush, however that is not an absolute. The unsetleling thing about people is that there is no absolute. This man deserved everything (and hopefuly more, because if he is dead I am sure he is rotting in hell) he got. The guard who tried to save a few people in IL’s example can’t be painted as purely evil.
Of course there are no absolutes when dealing with humans in any number greater than zero.
We work in generalities, majorities, pluralities, most of the times…
And the Holocaust so massively tips the scales on THAT standard that it is defacto “black and white”, eventhough the exception in both directions exists. Those exceptions are just so rare as to be statistically insignificant (they rank up there with the odds of 1 German INF taking all of Russia single-handed)
There is a limit to how good a person can be, but there is no limit to what evil a person can commit.
? I don’t get what you get from this. I feel more sorry (if that’s possible) for the kid because he was hurt by his own people as well as the Nazi’s. I don’t feel any better about the Nazi’s. I don’t feel any better about pedophiles either. Evil is evil. Who commits it does nothing to reduce the crime or make it better or worse. Sadly, the truth is most child abuse is done by people close to you. People you know very well. People that are trusted enough to be alone with you. Anobymous crime on kids is the exception not the rule. Now that should give you real pause. I know it bothers me. I have 3 kids, all young. Knowing I can’t trust anyone makes the world a scary place indeed.
What that pedophile did was evil, pure and simple. I also can readily acknowledge that people in this world do terrible things to other people (Paul
Bernard etc.). My question is: To what degree was the mentality of this “man” and his actions affected by the inhuman(e) treatment of the concentration camp? I am not absolving this man by any stretch, however there are SOOOO many variables that we can not see. I think that there may be some “evil-begetting-evil” here.
Yeah I remember watching some documentary in a humanities course about the Holocaust and it ends with something to the effect of “but does the monster really lie buried beneath these ruins [of cocentration camps], or does it lie within us all, dormant, waiting again to be unleashed?”
good question. Better than you think.
I gave a talk on PTSD in Holocaust survivors. These people have done amazingly well all things considered, however there is a DEEP imprint on them that is going to be a real problem for them, their families, and their health-care providers.
Be quiet everyone!
By talking about something which never happened you will anger a Muslim or two.
I do not think I could have lived 60 years with that on my conscience. Whether God forgave me or not.
I recall an article about a girl in Poland who did research about the WWII history of her village. A monument was built to Jewish holocaust victims. The names had been removed. She found evidence that the government and some villagers had cooperated in capturing and killing the Jews. It had been covered up. There was bitterness among the villgers that she had dug this up.
The fabric of civilization is very thin. Studies have shown individuals will become barbaric in many cases whether alone or in a mob.
