Business of Life

Human Potential for Evil

Everyone is a potential torturer.  All humans are capable of committing torture and other acts of great evil according to an analysis of over 25,000 psychological studies involving 8 million participants by Susan Fiske and colleagues at Princeton University.

It's hard to avoid reports of human evil as we read reports on the 60th anniversaries of the liberation of the death camps and the victory in Europe.  Joshua Greene recounts the story of the liberation of Dachau and William Denson, the prosecutor from Alabama who brought Nazis to justice.

But this story by Seth Siegel in last Friday's Wall St Journal is about the rippling effects of good acts by ordinary people.  Yom HaShoah is Holocaust Memorial Day.

From its earliest observance, Yom HaShoah focused in part on the hopeful and heroic--the glimmers of light in the otherwise unremitting darkness of those years. "Who was a hero?" asks Dr. Jacob J. Schacter, dean of the (Orthodox) Rabbi Soloveitchik Institute in Boston. "Ghetto fighters, partisans, resisters of any kind, even those who continued to live a moral life in the face of such evil."

In preparation for this year's Yom HaShoah, a Jewish school in New York discovered one such act of defiance and survival. At a recent parents' meeting at the progressive Abraham Joshua Heschel School on Manhattan's Upper West Side, two fathers of young daughters introduced themselves and learned, remarkably, that both of their fathers had been born in the same small Ukrainian town.

The Heschel parents, an American and an Israeli, realized that, since there was only a single Nazi transport from the town, both of their fathers were undoubtedly on the same train bound for an extermination camp in October 1942. The American told of his then 19-year-old father, who escaped by jumping through a plank he had dislodged from above a window in the car. His father, telling the story, always added that, before he jumped, he pushed a boy up and out through that loosened plank.

The Israeli instantly knew who the boy was, for his own father had always told of how there was an opening too high for him to reach--he was then age 11--and of how an older boy lifted him up and pushed him out. The two boys never saw each other again, but each, miraculously, survived the war by hiding in Ukrainian farms and forests. Now their children, so far in time and space from these events, came to learn that their daughters are in the same class.

In earlier years, the school's Yom HaShoah memorials have featured Heschel grandparents, including leaders of anti-Nazi partisan groups and survivors who described life in the ghettos. Those presentations were extraordinary, but perhaps none was equal to this story of entwined generations--and the hope it offers.