The dilemma of acting or just standing by

DON KRAUSZ

Don Krausz, Chairman, Association of Holocaust Survivors, Johannesburg writes:

Some of us may remember Christopher Isherwood’s play and film “I am a Camera”, in which he describes the early days of Nazism in Berlin. He challenges his German landlady on her anti-Semitic views and she replies: “But all the speakers say so!”

But what ought one say in that situation? The fanatical hater we won’t influence, but the “Ordinary Man”, as Christopher Browning calls the murderer, may be induced to hesitate while his finger is on the trigger. Can we get him to say: “THIS I DON’T DO!” and so save a life?

I lecture on the Shoah at schools, including German ones, and have to deal with the dilemma of an anti-Nazi mother during the Nazi period. Her son is at school where the ideology of racial hatred is taught.

Soon he will have to join the Hitler Jugend – the Nazi boy scouts – and after that the army, perhaps even be selected for the SS. Most of his older male relatives may already have been recruited. How can she prevent the child from being turned into a little monster?

Say she questions him on what he has been taught upon his return home. She may be disgusted, but any expression of disapproval could be reflected by the child at school and teachers would pick this up immediately. This could result in her landing up in a concentration camp and then be of no use to her child. Yet dare she just stand by and watch the indoctrination happen?

She has an obligation to help the boy before he is totally contaminated. Criticise the teachers or the regime she dare not and attending church won’t help either. Vicious fanatical murderers were also regular worshippers even after participating in massacres. Food for thought.

She must give that child a moral grounding, a conviction of what he must and must not do, even if that results in a sadder, but a wiser boy.