The takeover of Jewish property was so widespread in occupied Poland that it called for the emergence of rules determining distribution. Thus when in August 1941 a certain Helena Klimaszewska went from the hamlet of Goniądz to Radziłów “to get an apartment for her husband’s parents because she knew that after the liquidation of the Jews there are empty apartments,” she was told on arrival that a certain “Godlewski decides what to do with ‘post-Jewish’ apartments.” She presented her request to him but, she later testified in court, “Godlewski replied, ‘don’t even think about it.’ When I said that Mr Godlewski has four houses at his disposal and I don’t even have one he replied ‘this is none of your business, I am awaiting a brother returning from Russia where the Soviets deported him and he has to have a house.’ When I insisted that I need an apartment, he replied, ‘when people were needed to kill the Jews, you weren’t here, and now you want an apartment,’" an argument that met with a strong rebuttal from Klimaszewska’s mother-in-law: “They don’t want to give an apartment, but they sent my grandson to douse the house with gasoline…” And so, we are witnessing a conversation between an older woman and other adults that is premised on the assumption that one gains a right to valuable goods by taking part in murder of their owners.It's a shift in moral perspective powerful enough to permit its participants to feel genuine outrage at their mistreatment according to the new rules. "That's not fair" is a cry that always resonates, even among people who deny the power of any traditional system to restrict their own behavior.
Situational ethics
From Theodore Dalrymple, via Maggie's Farm, a quotation from Golden Harvest: Events at the Periphery of the Holocaust by Jan Tomasz Gross, about what Dalrymple calls a "transvaluation" of moral values:
It sure sounds like the standard "entitlement class" dialog. Different time and place, same result- greed and envy are terrible masters.
ReplyDeleteIt's actually just the grasshopper and the ant: "Where were you when the work was to be done?" The work, in this case, was just the killing off of the previous owners.
ReplyDeleteHannah Arendt wrote about this problem too, and one of the things she noted was that for the most part the Nazis went out of their way to exclude people with mental or moral problems from the killing units. They just found ways of explaining what they were about in these traditional moral terms -- like the grasshopper and the ant.
ReplyDeleteSo, for example, members of the Einsatzgruppen were given speeches in which they were praised for their sacrifices. 'Of course we understand how hard and how terrible this is,' they would be told by a highly-ranked Nazi. 'No one should have to go through what you've been through. That's what makes it so praiseworthy: what you are doing means that your children and grandchildren will never have to be put through this kind of hardship.'
Because, of course, you'll have killed all the Jews already.
As someone said, if you take away God, it's not that people will believe in nothing, it's that often they will believe in anything. And if you abandon an old moral code, it's not that people will live without a moral code, but that they'll often adopt the first one they're handed that works out well for themselves personally and in the moment.
ReplyDeleteBy saying this, I don't at all mean to imply that anyone here who believes neither in God nor in a traditional moral code is either amoral or universally credulous. Obviously some people in this camp try very hard to construct a coherent and admirable worldview and moral code. But history tells us that lots of people don't do at all well trying to construct such a thing on their own from scratch, under pressure.
This is an illustrative and horrifying read.
ReplyDeletehttp://books.google.com/books/about/Ordinary_Men.html?id=Tt4VBKiFGRcC
"And the king said to her, 'What is the matter with you?' And she answered, 'This woman said to me, 'Give your son that we may eat him today, and we will eat my son tomorrow.' So we boiled my son and ate him; and I said to her the next day, 'Give your son, that we may eat him'; but she has hidden her son.'" (2 Kings 6:28-29)
ReplyDeleteThat's a citation very much on point, Mr. Walker.
ReplyDelete