The Way of The World

Hall of Names, Yad Vashem

I have figured out the ways of the world: a few people (good or bad) do or try to do things (good or bad) which are either supported or opposed by a few people (good or bad). The rest of the people, as the phrase goes, look on. 

And "few" is a matter of scale. Good few or bad few, few can be as simple as a handful of individuals, or as simple as a handful of nations made up of millions of individuals. As for those who look on, that too, is simple. That is, all those who remain inert, be they a couple looking on or a couple billion looking on.

I learned this over the past two days while visiting Vad Yashem, Israel's memorial to the Holocaust. 

Yad Vashem is an excellent complex of museums, research centers, and architectural and fine art sculptures. Its focal point is the The Holocaust Museum. The museum consists of a single, straight, triangular hall of poured concrete, whose base is broad, walls pitch, and peak high, from which eight galleries radiate. Made of glass, the hall's apex allows for its natural lighting. 

Running the hall's length, zig-zags connect the museum's eight galleries, with each beveled zig or zag creating an unbridgeable gully of several feet in the concrete floor. You can look past them, even see the museums triangular glass exit, but you cannot cross over them. Instead, containing mini-exhibits of their own, each serves as an introduction to the the gallery you are about to enter.

The path to the museum's end is direct, but not straight. You can not get to any gallery without walking through the gallery preceding it. In order to move forward, you must follow the path. Yet, within each gallery, you find that there are no clear signs conveying you along. Each gallery moves you obliquely through acute angles and around hair-pin turns. Sometimes you arrive at a spot you've already visited. You may become disoriented by the maze, but you follow the flow of human traffic, when, eventually you see some of the light from the hallway spilling in and you follow it out.

Zig-zags within a zig-zag. Nothing is straight. The history of the holocaust was not straight. Each gallery its own chapter, the museum tells a story, a crooked story (The Galleries). 

It's a very detailed story, told through curator's paragraphs; photographs; hand written family letters and typed bureaucrats' letters; physical artifacts as small a tiny charm made by a ghetto boy for his mother and as large as a cattle car for the deportation; video recordings, sound recordings, posters, street signs, trolly rails, cobblestones, streetlamps, and anything else which either informs or authenticates. To read every word, to pore over every photo or artifact, to watch every video, to listen to every audio, would take many days. The documentation is overwhelming. 

All of which kept me occupied for 9 hours yesterday and 3 today (because I only got half-way through the sixth gallery yesterday before getting tossed at closing time, and so I returned to finish today).    

The ways of the world became most clear to me in the fifth gallery, Mass Murder. In it, I learned of the Einsatzgruppen. The Einsatzgruppen were German units that followed the advances of the regular German army as it tore eastward toward Russia (after Hitler broke his treaty with Stalin). Their sole mission was to flush out the Jews in whatever community they came across and shoot them. Often, they would have the Jewish men dig a big pit first, then have them stand on the edge and shoot them, so that the corpses would topple into the pit. Occasionally they toppled as not-yet corpses. Then the Einsatzgruppen would gather the women and children and shoot them as well, in the same manner, at the edge of the pit. 

Sometimes, however, the Einsatzgruppen skipped the pit and just shot. And sometimes they would allow eager local Jew-haters to do the shooting for them. There were lots of willing trigger fingers when the Einsatzgruppen pulled into town.

Here, though, is how I learned the ways of the world. As you can imagine, many tour groups visit Yad Vashem and the Holocaust Museum, in-tow to a free-lance museum guide. If you move slowly enough through any gallery, as I did, several of these groups will pass you. And if their guides speak in a language you understand, you can pirate the lectures, as I did with those who spoke English. Hence, several times, when the tour guides spoke of the Einsatzgruppen, and the pits, and the shootings, the consistent refrain was, "And the townspeople just stood by and watched," or, "The townspeople simply looked on."

I detected something barbed in these statements about the townspeople, though I am not sure of the source. I couldn't tell if the guides intended to convey that there was complicity among the townspeople, that their onlooking was a form of voting with their eyes, that inaction indicated implicit approval. Or, it could have been more that the guides were alleging mass moral collapse among the townspeople, that in the face of atrocities they watched and did nothing. Wholesale cowardice.

I began to wonder about these townspeople, these onlookers, and the judgments of the museum guides toward them. 

For the sake of humanity, I hope that the majority of townspeople didn't look on and do nothing because they approved of what was being done. 

If, then, people looked on because they didn't know what to do, or were too afraid in the face of men with guns to do what they knew they should, I wonder what, we, history's jurors, really might have expected of them. Not to diminish the enormity of the mass murders, nor to condone moral inertia, we have seen -- and likely participated -- in onlooking elsewhere. From the lynching ropes in the U.S. south, to the machetes in Rwanda, people, in general, acquiesce in the presence of brutality, not because people are bad, or even weak, but rather because we are uneducated. We have never been taught or trained to act on our principles and moral values, or even to articulate for ourselves what they are. 

It is always assumed that we will, or at least that we should, stand-up, do the right thing, when virtue calls, but when the decisive moment arrives, what can we point to in our past as having readied us for that moment? If anything, in the absence of any positive preparation to act as moral beings, we are, gradually, conditioned not to act. I don't know about you, but -- and obviously I am not proud to admit it -- I suspect that had I been in the wrong place at the wrong time, I, too, would have been one of those townspeople who looked on. 

It's the way of the world, isn't it? And the evil of the world know it. Nothing breeds evil, feeds evil, as the way of the world.