XOX’s Reviews > Black Earth > Status Update

Understanding the Holocaust is our chance, perhaps our last one, to preserve humanity. That's not enough for its victims. No accumulation of good, no matter how vast, undoes an evil; no rescue of the future, no matter how successful, undoes a murder in the past. Perhaps it is true that to save one life is to save the world. But the converse is not true: saving the world does not restore a single lost life.

Understanding the Holocaust is our chance, perhaps our last one, to preserve humanity.

If we believe that the Holocaust was a result of the inherent characteristics of Jews, Germans, Poles, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, or anyone else, then we are moving in Hitler's world.

We share Hitler's planet and several of his preoccupations; we have changed less than we think. We like our living space, we fantasize about destroying governments, we denigrate science, we dream of catastrophe. If we think we are victims of some planetary conspiracy, we edge towards Hitler.

If these rescuers had anything in common beyond that, it was self-knowledge. When you know yourself there is little to say. This is worth brooding upon as we consider whow we, who know ourselves so poorly and have so much to say about ourselves, will respond to the challenges to come.

In the darkest of times and places, a few people rescue Jews for what seems like no earthly reason. These tended to be people who in normal times might seem to take ethical and social norms a bit too literally, and whose fidelity to their expressed principles survived the end of the institutions that supported and defended them.

“Wanting to help was not enough. To rescue a Jew in these conditions, where no structure supported the effort and where the penalty was death, required something stronger than character, something greater than a worldview.

Sexual advances or exploitation of Jewish girls who were running for their lives was common. Girls have to navigate this and not stay with men who use this situation to get sexual favours.

Exception to the rule. Some Christians help Jesus based on their own understanding of helping a neighbour. That's based on humanism, not the evil Catholic teaching.

The dominant Roman Catholic Church in Poland took no stance against the mass murder of millions of Jews who had lived for centuries among its adherents. Catholic doctrine at the time deemed Jews collectively responsible for the killing of Jesus, and Catholic teachings about modernity connected the blight of communism to Judaism.

The Catholic Church has always been a disgusting, evil, immoral institution.