200 Towards a Sociological Theory of Morality

nation, a civilized nation, could be capable of such a thing. And then, soon after 1945,.we see the query turned around totally as one begins, to ask: Is there any western nation that is incapable of it? ... In 1941 the Holocaust was not expected and that is the very reason for our subsequent anxieties. We no longer dare to exclude the unimaginable.²⁹

Afterthought: Rationality and Shame

There is a story from Sobibor: fourteen inmates tried to escape. In a matter of hours they were all caughtand brought to the camp assembly square to confront the rest of the prisoners, There, they were told: 'In a moment you will die, of course. But before you do, each of you will choose his companion in death.' They said, Never!' 'If you refuse, said thrcommandant; quietly, I'll do the selection for you. Only I will choose fifty; not fourteen.' He did hot" have to carry out his threat.

In Lanzmann's Shoah a survivor of the successful escape from Trebiinka (remembers that when the inftow of the gas chambers" fodder slowed down, members of the Sonderkammando had their food rations withdrawn and, since they were no longer useful, were threatened with extermination. Their prospects of survival brightened when new Jewish populations were rounded up and loaded into trains destined for Trebiinka.

Again in Lanzmann's film, a former Sonderkommando member, now a Tel-Aviv barber, reminisces how, while shaving the hair of the victims for German mattresses, he kept silent about the purpose of the exercise and prodded his clients to move faster towards what they were made to believe was a communal bath.

In the discussion started by the profound and moving article 'Poor Poles look at the Ghetto by Professor Jan Blonski and conducted in 1987 on the pages of the respected Polish Catholic weekly Tygodnik Powszecbny, Jerzy Jastrzebowski recalled a story told by an older member of his family. The family offered to hide an old friend, a Jew

202 Afterthought: Rationality and Shame

who looked Polish and spoke the elegant Polish of a nobleman; but refused to do the same for his three sisters, who looked Jewish and spoke with a pronounced Jewish accent. The friend refused to be saved alone. Jastrzebowski comments:.

Had the decision of my family been: different, there were nine chances to one that we would^!be all shot, fin Nazi-occupied Poland, - the punishment for hiding- or helping Jews was death.] The probability that our friend and his-sisters would survive in those conditions was perhaps smaller still. And yet the person telling me this family drama and repeating What could we do, there was nothing we could do!', did not look me in the eyes. He sensed I felt a lie, though all the facts were true.

Another contributor to the discussion, Kazimierz Dziewanowski, wrote:

If in our country, in our presence and in Front of our eyes, several millions of innocent people were killed- this was an event so horrifying, a tragedy so immense - that it is proper, human, and understandable that those who survived are haunted and cannot recover their calm ... It is impossible to prove that more could have been done, yet neither is it possible to prove that one could not.do.more.

Wiadystaw Bartoszewski, during the occupation in charge of the Polish assistance to the Jews, commented: 'only he may say he has done everything he could, who paid the price of death'.

- - - By far the most shocking among Lanzmann's messages is the rationality .of evil (or was it the evil of rationality?). Hour after hour during that interminable agony of watching Shoah the terrible, humiliating truth is uncovered and paraded in its obscene nakedness: how few men with guns were needed to murder millions.

Amazing how frightened those few men with the rifles were; how conscious of the brittleness of their mastery over human cattle. Their power rested on the doomed living in a make-believe world, the world which they, the men with rifles, defined and narrated for their victims. In that world, obedience was rational; rationality was obedience. Rationality paid - at least for a time - but in that world there was no other, longer time. Each step on the road to death was carefully shaped so as to be calculable in terms of gains and losses, rewards and punishments. Fresh air and music rewarded the long, unremitting suffocation in the cattle carriage. A bath, complete with cloakrooms and

Afterthought: Rationality and Shame 203

barbers, towel and soap, was a welcome liberation from lice, dirt, and the stench ot human sweat and excrement. Rational people will go quietly, meekly, joyously into a gas chamber, if only they are allowed to believe it is a bathroom.

Members of the Sonderkommando knew that to tell the bathers that

the bathroom was a gas chamber was an offence punishable by instant

death. The crime would not seem so abominable, and the punishment

would not be so harsh-, had the victims been led to their death simply by

fear or suicidal resignation. But to found their order on fear alone, the SS

would have needed ore.troops,;arms and money. Rationality was more

effective,.easier to obtain, and cheaper. And thus to destroy them, the SS

men carefully cultivated the rationality of their victims.

Interviewed recently on British TV, a high-ranking South African security chief let the cat out of the bag: the true danger of the ANC, he said, lies not in acts of sabotage and terrorism - however spectacular or costly - but in inducing the black population, or the large part of it, to disregard 'law and order'; if that happened even the best intelligence and most powerful security forces would be helpless (an expectation confirmed recently by the experience of Intifada). Terror remains effective as long as the balloon of rationality has not been pricked. The most sinister,. cruel, bloody-minded ruler must remain a staunch . preacher, and defender of rationality - or perish. Addressing his subjects, he must.'speak to reason'. He must protect reason, eulogize on the virtues of the calculus of costs and effects, defend logic against passions and values which, unreasonably, do not count costs and refuse to obey logic.

By and large, all rulers can count on rationality being on their side. But the Nazi rulers, additionally, twisted the stakes of the game so that the rationality of survival would render all other motives of human action irrational. Inside the Nazi-made world, reason was the enemy of morality. Logic required consent to crime. Rational defence of one's survival called for non-resistance to the other's destruction. This rationality pitched the sufferers against each other and obliterated their . joint humanity. It also made them into a threat and an enemy of all the, others, not yet marked for death, and granted for the time being the role of bystanders. Graciously, the noble creed of rationality absolved both the victims and the bystanders from the charge of immorality and from guilty conscience. Having reduced human life to the calculus of self-preservation, this rationality robbed human life of humanity.

Nazi rule is long over, yet its poisonous legacy is far from dead. Our