Материал: Bauman.Zygmunt..modernity and holocaust, polity press 1989
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
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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that when the inftow of the gas chambers" fodder slowed down, members of the Sonderkammando had their food rations withdrawn and, since they were no longer useful, were threatened with extermination.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
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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
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continuous inability to come to terms with the meaning of the Holocaust, our inability to call the bluff of the murderous hoax, our willingness to go on playing the game of history with the loaded dice of reason so understood that it shrugs the clamours of morality as irrelevant or loony, our consent to the authority of cost-effective calculus as an argument against ethical commandments - all these bear an eloquent evidence to the corruption the Holocaust exposed but did little, it appears, to discredit.
Two years of my early childhood were marked with my grandfather's heroic yet vain attempts to introduce me to the treasures of biblical lore. Perhaps he was not a very inspiring teacher; perhaps I was an obtuse and ungrateful pupil. The fact is, I remember next to nothing from his lessons. One story, however, carved itself into my brain deeply and haunted me for many years. This was a story of a saintly sage who met a beggar on the road while travelling with a donkey loaded with sackfuls of food. The beggar asked for something to eat. 'Wait,' said the sage, I must first untie the sacks.' Before he finished the unpacking, however, the long hunger took its toll and the beggar died. Then the sage started his prayer: Punish me, o Lord, as I failed to save the life of my fellow man!' The shock this story gave me is well-nigh the only thing I remember from the interminable list of my grandfather's homilies..It clashed with all the mental drill to which my schoolteachers subjected me at that time and ever since. The story struck me as illogical (which it was), and therefore wrong (which it was not). It took the Holocaust to convince me that the second does not necessarily follow from the first.
Even if one knows that not much more could have been done practically to save the victims of the Holocaust (at least not without additional, and probably formidable, costs), this does not mean that moral qualms can be put to sleep. Neither does it mean that a moral person's feeling of shame is unfounded (even if its irrationality in terms of self-preservation can be, indeed, easily proved). To this feeling of shame - an indispensable condition of victory over the slow-acting poison, the pernicious legacy of the Holocaust - the most scrupulous and historically accurate computations of the numbers of those who could' and those who 'could not' help, of those who could' and those who 'could not' be helped, are irrelevant.
Even the most sophisticated quantitative methods of researching 'the facts of the matter' would not advance us very far toward an objective (i.e. universally binding) solution to the issue of moral responsibility. There is no scientific method to decide whether their gentile neighbours
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failed to prevent the transportation of Jews to the camps because the Jews were so passive and docile, or whether the Jews so seldom escaped their guards because they had nowhere to escape to - sensing the hostility, or indifference, of the environment. Equally, there are no scientific methods to decide whether the well-off residents of the Warsaw ghetto could have done more to alleviate the lot of the poor dying in the streets of hunger and hypothermia, or whether the German Jews could have rebelled against the deportaton of the Ostjuden, or the Jews with French citizenship could have done something to prevent incarceration of the 'non-French Jews'. Worse still, however, the calculation of objective possibilities and computation of costs only blurs the moral essence of the problem.
The issue is not whether those who survived, collectively - fighters who on occasion could not but be bystanders, bystanders who on occasion could not but fear to become victims - should feel ashamed, or whether they should feel proud of themselves. The issue is that only the liberating feeling of shame may help to recover the moral significance of the awesome historical experience and thus help to exorcise the spectre of the Holocaust, which to this day haunts human conscience and makes us neglect vigilance at present for the sake of living in peace with the past. The choice is not between shame and pride. The choice is between the pride of morally purifying shame, and the shame of morally devastating pride. I am not sure how I would react to a stranger knocking on my door and asking me to sacrifice myself and my family to save his life. I have been spared such a choice. I am sure, however, that had I refused shelter, I would be fully able to justify to others and to myself that, counting the number of lives saved and lost, turning the stranger away was an entirely rational decision. I am also sure that I would feel that unreasonable, illogical, yet all-too-human shame. And yet I am sure, as well, that were it not for this feeling of shame, my decision to turn away the stranger would go on corrupting me till the end of my days.
The inhuman world created by a homicidal tyranny dehumanized Us victims and those who passively watched the victimization by pressing both to use the logic of self-preservation as absolution for moral insensitivtty and inaction. No one can be proclaimed guilty for the sheer fact of breaking down under such pressure. Yet no one can be excused from moral self-deprecation for such surrender. And only when feeling ashamed for one's weakness can one finally shatter the mental prison which has outlived its builders and its guards. The task today is to destroy that potency of tyranny to keep its victims and witnesses
206 Afterthought: Rationality and Shame
prisoners long after the prison had been dismantled.
Year by year the Holocaust shrinks to the size of a historical episode which, in addition, is fast receding into the past. The significance of its memory consists less and less in the need to punish the criminals, or to setrlq still-open accounts. The criminals who escaped trial are now old men well advanced in their senility; so are, or they soon will be, most of" those who survived their crimes. Even if another murderer is discovered, pulled out of his hiding ancf brought to belated justice, it will be increasingly difficult to match the enormity of his crime with the sanctity of;dignity of the legal process. (Witness the embarassing . experience of Demianiuk's and barbie's court cases.) There are also fewer and fewer people left who, in the times of gas chambers, were old enough to decide whether to open, or. to dose the door to the strangers seeking shelter. If repayment of cfimes and account-settling exhausted the historical significance of the Holocaust, one could well let this horrifying episode stay where it ostensibly belongs - in the past - and leave it to the care of professional historians. The truth is, however, that the settling of accounts is just one reason to remember the Holocaust forever. And a minor reason at that - at no time has it yet been so evident as it is now, when that reason rapidly loses whatever remained of its practical importance. ■ [ '
•Today, more than at any other time, the Holocaust is nor a private r property, (if.it ever was one); not of its perpetrators, t<? be punished for; nqt of its direct victims, .to -ask for special sympathy, favours or indulgence on account of past sufferings; and not of its-witnesses, taseek redemption or certificates of innocence. The present-day significance of the Holocaust is the lesson it contains for the whole of humanity.
The lesson of the Holocaust is the facility with which most people,
put into a situation that does not contain a good choice, or renders such a
good choke very costly, argue thenjiselves away from qhe issue of moral
duty (or fail to argue themselves towards it), adopting instead the
precepts of rational interest and self-preservation. In a system where
- rationality and ethics point in opposite directions, humanity is the main
-loser. Evil can do its dirty work, hoping -that most people most of the
4time will.refrain from doing rash, reckless things - and resisting evil is
rash and reckless. Evil needs neither enthusiastic followers nor an
applauding audience - the instinct of self-preservation will do,
encouraged by the comforting thought that it is not my turn yet, thank
God: by lying low, I can still escape.
And there is another lesson of the Holocaust, of no lessee importance.
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If the first lesson contained a warning, the second offers hope; it is the second lesson that makes the first worth repeating.
The second lesson tells us that putting self-preservation above moral duty is in no way predetermined, inevitable and inescapable. One can be pressed to do it, but one cannot be forced to do it, and thus one cannot really shift the responsibility for doing it on to those who exerted the pressure. It does not matter how many people chose moral duty over the rationality of self-preservation - what does matter is that some did. Evil is not all-powerful. It can be resisted. The testimony of the few who did resist shatters the authority of the logic of self-preservation. It shows it for what it is in the end - a choice. One wonders how many people must defy that logic for evil to be incapacitated. Is there a magic threshold of defiance beyond which the technology of evil grinds to a halt?