Friends and Enemies: Our Need to Love and Hate. Dorothy Rowe

the other child says, ‘How could you be so cruel as to send me away from home?’

      No doubt the child who disliked being away from home would say, ‘You didn’t listen to me,’ but parents can listen to their children and still get it wrong. The circumstances of their lives did not offer them an infinite range of choices, and they could not foresee how ideas about education and families would change. They could act only with the knowledge they had then. Later perhaps the best they can do for their life story and for their adult children is to say to them, ‘Yes, these things did happen. I tried to do my best but I can see now I made mistakes. I’m sorry.’

      The question of responsibility is quite different when our choice of action was not constrained by what we knew at the time. If we know that something is wrong and we still choose to do it we are fully responsible for our actions. Every adult who accepted Hitler’s plan to exterminate all those people who impeded his plan for a pure Aryan race, and who by action or non-action helped put his plan into operation, is responsible for what each one of them did. It was not only Germans who chose this course of action. Such people came from all the European states. What they had in common was an inheritance of ideas from European civilization and from the Christian tradition. Most would have claimed an allegiance to one of the Christian churches, but even those who did not call themselves Christians would still have been aware of Christ’s teaching about the necessity of loving one another and forgiving our enemies. Not one could honestly claim, ‘I didn’t know it was wrong to humiliate, torture and kill other people.’

      Knowing that we have acted wrongly should provoke guilt and shame, but these are very painful emotions. One way of dealing with them is to lie to yourself. You tell yourself a story which is not true.

      Most adults who lie to themselves begin by lying to other people. Certain facts are inconvenient for them: they do not want to take responsibility for what they do. They act in bad faith towards other people, and they slip into acting in bad faith towards themselves. They start believing their own lies, and, as I now observe in my contemporaries who have done this for most of their lives, as the years pass their memory becomes confused. They have lost the ability to distinguish between what did happen and what they fantasized had happened, what they themselves did and what other people did. Through their lies they have denied themselves the strength and comfort our life story can give us when we reach an age where the inevitability of death cannot be denied. For this we need a life story which is grounded in the truth that we have made mistakes, we have suffered, we have endured life’s blows, but we have come through and it was good. Though we might fear the processes which lead to death, we do not fear death itself for it is the appropriate end to our story.

      To arrive at such a story is not easy. Primo Levi acknowledged how hard it is when he wrote about Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, former commissioner in charge of Jewish affairs in the Vichy government around 1942, who was personally responsible for the deportation of 70,000 Jews. After the war, wrote Primo Levi,

      Darquier denies everything: the photographs of the piles of corpses are montages; the statistics of millions of dead were fabricated by the Jews, always greedy for publicity, commiseration and the indemnities … I think I can recognize in him the typical case of someone who, accustomed to lying publicly, ends by lying in private too, to himself, and building for himself a comforting truth which allows him to live in peace.

      To keep good faith and bad faith distinct costs a lot: it requires a decent sincerity or truthfulness with oneself, it demands a continuous intellectual and moral effort.²⁹

      Some people are not prepared to make such a moral effort. They are not prepared to suffer the pain of shame and guilt or the difficulties which can follow the making of a moral choice.

      In 1998 the German news weekly Der Spiegel carried a story by Bruno Schirra about his visit to the eighty-seven-year-old Dr Hans Münch, a Bavarian doctor who could attest to the accuracy of the film Schindler’s List. He told Bruno Schirra, ‘“The selection process is portrayed completely authentically. Every detail is right. It was exactly like that.”’

      Bruno Schirra wrote,

      Hans Münch spent 19 months in Auschwitz. He served in the Hygiene Institute of the Waffen-SS. He carried out his work as conscientiously as all the other SS ranks. ‘To eradicate the Jews, that was the job of the SS at the time,’ says Münch. ‘I could do experiments on people, which otherwise were only possible on rabbits. It was important work for science.’

      Münch wanted to be a scientist and Auschwitz gave him what he wanted. He said,

      ‘These were ideal working conditions: a laboratory with excellent equipment and a selection of academics with worldwide reputations.’

      His job was to fight epidemics. Typhus, dysentery and typhoid were always breaking out, and since SS people were dying, there was a need for action.

      But fighting epidemics in Auschwitz meant ‘that all the huts were closed off. Nobody came out and nobody went in. Everybody was gassed, because it was possible that someone could pass it on. That was the usual treatment.’

      He talks about it casually. There is no doubt and no emotion.

      ‘Did it bother you?’

      ‘No, no, not at all, because it was the only way not to let things get much, much, much worse.’

      ‘Gassing was better?’

      ‘Of course! Of course! If you think it through to its logical conclusion, it was the only way to prevent the whole camp from being destroyed.’

      Münch still believes today that this was the only possibility. For him, it was a humane act. ‘If they hadn’t been gassed, they would have died terrible deaths from epidemics.’

      For Münch, the notorious SS doctor Josef Mengele was ‘the kindest of colleagues. I can only say the best things about him.’ On 29 June 1944 Mengele sent him the head of a twelve-year-old child. Münch examined it and sent the findings back on 8 July. ‘It was an everyday event,’ he says today. ‘Mengele and the others sent us heads, livers, spinal cords, whatever they had, and we analysed them.’ Did he ever refuse? Even today the idea is unthinkable. ‘That was my duty, and duty was duty, and schnaps was schnaps.’

      Dr Münch’s wife was with him in Auschwitz. During the interview she became increasingly distressed. She said, ‘“My God, I’m so ashamed of being German.” Münch looks up. “I’m not.” Well, he says, the Jews might have had it bad in Auschwitz. But it wasn’t easy for him either.’ When asked, ‘“What does Auschwitz mean to you?”’ he answered calmly, ‘“Nothing.”’³⁰

      What can we say about Dr Münch? To say he is a monster might relieve our feelings but it does not explain what he is actually doing when he eschews shame and guilt and denies the suffering of other people. One way of explaining the process which led him to make such a monstrous choice is to see that when Dr Münch was offered a choice of disobeying orders, or fighting and perhaps dying on the Russian front, or, as he saw it, advancing his career, he chose his career. In doing so he retreated to an unelaborated form of thought which is concerned with the survival of the meaning structure no matter what the cost. This form of thought is the primitive form of pride.

       Primitive Pride

      On 15 April 1945 the British army entered Bergen-Belsen camp in north-west Germany. The soldiers who liberated the camp and the medical staff who came to assist them were among the first to report through their letters what they saw. Lieutenant-Colonel Mervin Willett Gonin, DSO, TD, wrote,

      I can give no adequate description of the Horror Camp in which my men and myself were to spend the next month of our lives. It was a barren wilderness, as bare and devoid of vegetation as a chicken run. Corpses lay everywhere, some in huge piles where they’d been dumped by other inmates, sometimes they lay singly or in pairs where they’d fallen as they’d shuffled along the dirt tracks … One knew that five hundred a day were dying