Opinion | The Road to Auschwitz Wasn’t Paved With Indifference

Lösener remains the lawyer who wrote the Nuremberg race laws, lending a veneer of legality to a crime. Maybe someone else would have ignored the rule of law or written more draconian laws if he hadn’t, but maybe not. What we can decide is whether we will be a participant in terrible things done by terrible people. It never works to participate in the terrible thing in order to try to make it less bad. It’s tempting, and can seem like the right thing to do: Lösener’s race laws included fewer people than a one-drop rule would (though that had negligible effect). Adolf Eichmann reasoned similarly: “If this thing had to be done at all, it was better that it be done in good order.” History shows that when you participate in an atrocity together with the perpetrators, in an attempt to make it somehow a little less horrible, in the end you’re still participating in the atrocity — and it is no less horrible.

Morality and My Mother

Like so many other things about me, my perspective on bystanders horrifies my mother. She is appalled that I could think we aren’t morally obligated to rescue each other, even at great personal sacrifice. To her, the obligation is obvious. “Do not stand idly by the blood of your neighbor!” she exclaims, channeling Leviticus. Heroic acts of upstanding have shaped my mother’s life. She is alive because of someone’s heroism, and she lost her job, prematurely ending a treasured career, because of her own. My mother was saved from the Holocaust by Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese consul who ignored orders and issued several thousand transit visas to Lithuanian Jews, allowing them to flee the advancing Gestapo. Many years later, when a colleague was unfairly fired, my mother organized senior employees to speak out against the injustice, even though she knew not only that she would be likely to lose her own job as a result but also that she was unlikely to get another job at her age. She did lose her job, and did not get another one. The loss profoundly affected the trajectory and quality of her life, but she still says she doesn’t regret what she did and would do it again.

Listening to my mother, I feel somewhat ashamed. I think I feel the shame of the ordinary person in the face of those who are morally greater than us; my mother is a much better person than I am. But I doubt the average person can be as heroic. Luckily, that is not necessary to avert moral catastrophe.

The Takeaway

The belief that atrocities happen when people aren’t educated against the evils of bystanding has become part of our culture and how we think we’re learning from history. “Don’t be a bystander!” we’re exhorted. “Be an upstander!” we teach our children. But that’s all a big mistake. All of it: It’s false that doing nothing creates moral catastrophes; it’s false that people are generally indifferent to the plight of others; it’s false that we can educate people into heroism; and it’s false that if we fail to transmit these lessons another Holocaust is around the corner.

Instead, the facts are more quotidian: Terrible things happen when people collaborate with terrible perpetrators; most people are generally helpful to the extent that their circumstances and temperament allow (unless they’ve been taught to hate); being a bystander is often morally permissible; being a hero is exceptional and instinctual (not taught); and what history teaches us is both easier and harder than the supposed dark dangers of bystanderdom. What history teaches us is: Don’t perpetrate; don’t collaborate. If you can be heroic, that is laudable. Those lessons are hard to learn, but effective and easy enough to follow to avert most vast moral crimes.

Next time the murderers come, it’s understandable if it’s too much to ask for us to risk our lives, our children, or even our jobs, to save others. Just don’t welcome the murderers, don’t help them organize the oppression or make it “less terrible” (that won’t work anyway), and don’t turn people in. That will usually be enough.

Rivka Weinberg is a professor of philosophy at Scripps College in Claremont, Calif.

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