Looking at Evil

When I came upon the literature of the Holocaust and of the deliberate eradication of other groups deemed “unworthy” of existing in the desired “racially pure” Third Reich, I discovered a terrain within which over decades I could explore questions of morality, philosophy, and religion, in other words, of the nature of humanity, both historically and personally. I had a deeply felt need to understand myself and my own history. Over time I have come to realize that my experience is but one tiny event in the vast history of trials that humans have borne and have inflicted upon one another from the very beginnings of what we call our evolved humanity. Whether we bracket categories of familial abuse, racial, class, or gender persecutions and discriminations, slavery, war, or genocide, ultimately all come down to the same reality: humans are capable of inflicting harm upon one another, harm that reverberates from generation to generation within the individuals who both suffer it and inflict it upon others. We are neither inherently good nor inherently bad. Our experiences and importantly, the experiences of our forefathers and mothers, shape our manner of dealing with life and with others in ways that we don’t necessarily understand.

Much has been written about ways that we differ from (and are superior to) other animals. More interesting to me are the myriad ways that we resemble our cousin creatures. Looking into the lives and cultures of other mammals, we can see mirrored many of our own basic propensities. Like them we love and nurture our young, band in kinship groups for company and protection, and devise hierarchies of power in our communities. We fight, at times even to the death, to protect ourselves and our loved ones from aggression. Our battles are also fought to protect territories, sexual connections, and resources such as food and water that are necessary for survival. We develop strategies (technologies) to exploit and harvest whatever is perceived to be for the good of our own groupings, without particular regard to the costs accrued to those (in our present day, basically all other animal forms) subjected to our domination. Groups other than our own can represent a threat that must be beaten back least they overwhelm and destroy what is deemed vital among us. Viewed as “the Other,” our multi-faceted attacks upon them are justified by ideology, race/ethnicity, or religion.

Historian Niall Ferguson identifies WWII as the focus of what he calls “The War of the World,” a conflict that raged with unprecedented violence in various periods and locations throughout the 20th century. The "hot" wars of 1914-18 and 1939-45 gave way to the "cold" war, which though truncated in 1989 as the USSR lost its power to dominate Eastern Europe, continues its impact in the lives of those it has damaged. He argues that the rapid development of military technology and extreme ideologies can explain the incendiary quality of this period only when viewed within a context of economic volatility (ex, the great depression of the 1930s), of ethnic disintegration as populations shifted, intermingled, and rivalled one another for control, and, of the end of the empires that had for centuries maintained a relatively peaceful co-existence of the religious and ethnic groups within their borders.

The crimes against humanity acknowledged to have been committed during WWII and the prisoners brought to book afterward represent but the merest fraction of the actual carnage inflicted. To the victors the glory and to the defeated the blame. I say this not to imply any lack of culpability on the part of the Nazis (or of non-German nationals who assisted them in their atrocities), but to underscore the insufficiently acknowledged criminality (in this broad sense of crimes committed against innocents) of the Allied forces in their deliberate bombing of civilian populations in the “war effort.” Justifications are easy to come across in the literature describing these events but at bottom they are simply a mirror image of the kinds of dehumanizing and consequent destruction of others that the Allied forces considered themselves to be assailing.


There are times that I feel quite overwhelmed by the material that I am studying and by pieces I read in the paper about the on-going fall-out from the events of the 20th century. Mostly though, I am not in touch with that sense of horror and pain. If I were I would not be able to function as I do, going about my various lives as a city dweller, a psychotherapist, a mother and grandmother, a traveler, a reader and a writer. In my work as a therapist and even in meeting and talking with friends or random acquaintances, I am over and over again made aware how all of us are in some fashion the bearers of the residues of all that has gone before us. Each of us comes from a particular historical background – in the sense of her ethnicity, the lives and experiences of her parents, grandparents, and their ancestors, and the ways that she herself has interacted with these. Often it is difficult for us to clearly see the myriad ways that these residues have impacted upon us, influencing us in our understanding of our world and in our choices.

Because of my interest in history that began in my early teens, I have always wanted to know more about each individual’s antecedents, trying to link and to understand her within the context from which she has emerged. My good friend, a talented writer and story-teller must limit the boundaries of safety within which she can dwell, as she carries in her nervous system the terror of bombs falling nightly on the city of her birth scant months earlier. A grandson of Holocaust survivors continues to deal with his parents’ adaptations to their parents’ experiences. A man raised in Bangladesh but transported to Canada in his late teens experiences problems in his complex relationships with his Hindu parents. We cannot be understood or understand ourselves in a strictly intra-psychic or even intra-familial fashion as if we have come into the world and developed in it a-historically.

Before visiting these places in Eastern Europe, I wanted to lay out for myself some sense of their locations in the drama that unfolded between 1938 and 1945. In future posts I will explore this past.