Auschwitz Read Online Free

bravest survivors of the death camps, Toivi Blatt, who was forced by the Nazis to work in Sobibór and then risked his life to escape:
    People asked me, “What did you learn?” and I think I’m only sure of one thing—nobody knows themselves. The nice person on the street, you ask him, “Where is North Street?” and he goes with you half a block and shows you, and is nice and kind. That same person in a different situation could be the worst sadist. Nobody knows themselves. All of us could be good people or bad people in these [different] situations. Sometimes when somebody is really nice to me I find myself thinking, “How will he be in Sobibór?” 10
    What these survivors have taught me (and, if I am honest, I learned it from the perpetrators as well) is that human behavior is fragile and unpredictable and often at the mercy of the situation. Every individual still, of course, has a choice as to how to behave, it’s just that for many people the situation is the key determinate in that choice. Even those unusual individuals—like Adolf Hitler himself, for example—who appear to be masters of their own destiny were, to a considerable extent, created by their responses to previous situations. The Adolf Hitler known to history was substantially formed by the interaction between the pre-war Hitler—who was a worthless drifter—and the events of World War I, which was a global conflict over which he had no control. I know no serious scholar of the subject who thinks that Hitler could ever have risen to prominence without the transformation he underwent during that war, and the sense of intense bitterness he felt when Germany lost. Thus, we can go further than saying, “No World War I, no Hitler as German Chancellor,” and say, “No World War I, no individual who ever became the Hitler that history knows.” And while, of course, Hitler decided for himself how to behave (and in the process made
a series of personal choices that made him utterly deserving of all the obloquy heaped upon him) he was made possible only by that specific historical situation.
    This history also shows us, however, that if individuals can be buffeted around by the situation then groups of human beings working together can create better cultures which, in turn, can help cause individuals to behave more virtuously. The story of how the Danes rescued their Jews, and of how they ensured that the Jews had a warm welcome when they returned at the end of the war, is a striking example of that. The culture in Denmark of a strong and widely held belief in human rights helped make the majority of individuals behave in a noble way.
    But one must not be overly romantic about the Danish experience. The Danes, too, were influenced hugely by situational factors outside of their control: the timing of the Nazi attack on the Danish Jews (at a point when the Germans were clearly losing the war); the geography of their country (which allowed for a relatively straightforward escape across a narrow stretch of water to neutral Sweden); and the lack of a concerted effort by the SS to enforce the deportations.
    Nonetheless, it is reasonable to conclude that one form of partial protection against more atrocities like Auschwitz lies in individuals collectively ensuring the cultural mores of their society are antipathetic to such suffering. The overtly Darwinian ideals of Nazism, which rested on telling every “Aryan” German that he or she was racially superior, created, of course, precisely the reverse effect.
    In the end, though, there is a profound sense of sadness around this subject that cannot be reduced. Throughout the time I was working on this project the voices I heard loudest were those of the people whom we could not interview: the 1.1 million human beings who were murdered in Auschwitz, and in particular the more than 200,000 children who perished there and were denied the right to grow up