There are times and events which we witness that freeze us with stunning disbelief. Usually they are either extraordinary feats of courage in the face of insurmountable obstacles of fate or they are incogitable acts of cruelty committed on humanity.
However, when I toured Auschwitz, what really made me suffocated was neither the fact that 1.1 million people were killed and burned to ashes at the very place where I was standing and walking, nor the stomach-sickening visible artifacts of tons of human hair, thousands of shoes, countless pictures of hopeless eyes that pierced me right through my heart and swept me off my feet, nor was the massive industrial scale of operations (similar to how we build cars in assembly lines today) were built with a primary motive of ethnic cleansing
What really distressed me was the normalcy at which the EVIL has pervaded across and percolated down in so many individual humans to the levels where acts of showering Zyklon-B down on masses to their gruesome deaths, burning mountains of human flesh, physically torturing hapless broken souls have become daily mundane routines in those years, that it was boring in some ways to the people involved on both sides of unprecedented genocide operation in human history.
Reading memoirs and diary entries of Rudolph Hoess the commander of Auschwitz camp, Adolf Eichmann the architect of entire Holocaust operation, Heinrich Himmler the head of SS reveal that they took this killing as a regular every day job, just like we go to work during day and spend time with families in evenings and weekends. Rudolph Hoess who at times oversaw 12,000 deaths a day in those crematoriums comes across as a nice father, teaching right values to his kids. Himmler on the other hand would call his wife and daughter every day. Parties, massages and sometimes cultural activities in after hours and early hours are similarities that we can find in any normal life outside of these camps across any time period and any society.
The daily routineness was not limited to administrators who built and administered the Inferno on earth , but it can be seen in daily lives of victims too. We can see hints of them in holocaust survivors’ Eli Weisel's ‘The Night’, Victor Frankl's ‘Mans search of Meaning’ and various interviews of others who walked out alive.
Everybody in SS went around as if it is his or her daily job, executing the orders passed from above, not stopping for any brief moment and pondering on what were they doing or what was being done. After all these are Germans, I wondered loud. They are supposed to be cultured people, not primitive society's savages! More than how could they do this, the unfathomable thing was the ordinariness in the atmosphere or habitualness of people involved in those make-shift death-towns.
In fact that is what Eichmann, a man who held operational responsibility of holocaust claimed during his trial in Jerusalem. It was reported that ‘man displayed neither guilt for his actions nor hatred for those trying him, claiming he bore no responsibility because he was simply "doing his job". He asserted that he did his duty, he obeyed the law’.
What a travesty?!
“Banality of the Evil” – the most famous phrase we all know was written by philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt for New Yorker magazine after watching Eichmann’s trial. She basically concluded that Eichmann has built and organized the massive industrial operation of holocaust, not because he hated Jews, not because he had malice in his heart, not because he was antisemitic, not because he was a psychopath. He did it because it suited his careerist, ambitious reasons, conforming to the order, obediently executing them with no ideological passion. All reasons which we can find in most of our career lives in varying degrees today. (For those who are interested: Watch the movie “Hannah Arendt” on Netflix)
The banality of the times was in the air, not just among SS officers, but also among prisoners. At the very same time the black fumes with an odor of human flesh pouring out of crematoriums joining clouds in the cruel sky that is watching the atrocities silently, there were regular life activities occurring among prisoners under the very same blue umbrella. Cultural, religious activities may have been rare but they did take place. Frankl writes that they tried to find humor whenever they can as a get away under extreme conditions of work. Other prisoners recalled playing football on Sundays. Ron Jones who played as goalkeeper, wrote the book called ‘The Auschwitz goalkeeper”. He says “Football was a brief summer time respite from suffering, as throughout the games smoke would rise ominously from the chimneys. We were frightened that we would be next”. In the same breath he also says “There was the humiliation and the lack of food but on the whole life wasn’t too bad. The Germans, contrary to what a lot of people think, were pretty good to us on the whole.”
(It is probably worth mentioning here that a few Nazis cannot command vast masses of Jews, hence they assigned some Jewish prisoners as Kapos with few extra privileges than regular prisoners, to supervise Jewish labors and act as confidants of SS. It is widely reported that Kapos were frequently more brutal towards their brethern than Nazis, with the intention of impressing SS men)
The words ‘Life wasn’t too bad’ were intriguing for me. We all know that human mind is unique and has far-reaching flexibility that it can adapt to any circumstances, but describing Auschwitz life as ‘not bad’ was the least I expected to hear especially from the oppressed.
You see, it wasn’t that bad.
It isn’t that bad for him, except when it is his turn to walk into gas chamber and become victim of the institutionalized evil. I don’t blame him. After all, life has it’s own ways to find means to continue to live until it cannot. Life drives the encompassing body, mind and soul into many unimaginable paths, twists and turns with the sole purpose of survival. Nothing else, and no one else matter. So everyone falls in order, become conformists and a new practice gets established. A new routine emerges, and everything from there is banal again.
But it made me think. Yes, it wasn’t that bad for slaves. Yes it wasn’t that bad for oppressed castes in India. Yes it wasn’t that bad for women for eons in every society. Yes it wasn’t that bad for minorities living under majorities scornful tolerance. Yes it isn’t that bad for girls of FGM victims. Yes it isn’t that bad for non-binary humans. Yes it isn’t that bad for systematically oppressed sections across the planet. We can fill reams of papers with this list, extending to count even microaggressions in our everyday lives. And the list will reach each one of us in the end.
I wondered how much of banality was I part of evil practices in my times, both as an imperceptive aggressor and as an unequal, ill-treated individual in certain microcosms of my own society. No wonder I can recall the later easier than the former.
As I think of that, the normalcy that is associated with every bad thing with every practice in every society since hunter-gatherers to the current day digital communities living in hyperbole is troubling. Some traditions, methods, systems ranging from repugnant social practices to sinful, immoral, evil ways seem to be peculating into humans with utmost ease that they seem mundane from within. There seems to be some banality to them that is escaping the purview of collective moral compass. When we collectively lose the trajectory offered by that compass, too often the result seems to be the twirling and turning of our societies gyrating towards an ungraceful and abrupt fall in front of a mirror.
And the selfie in that mirror looks EVIL. I have seen that in various artifacts and relics as I said in the beginning.
"I was doing my job" is the frequent refrain. The other atrocities, while they were as bad, were understood to be bad, even at that time. It is unthinkable now that people knew what was happening in their midst and were conditioned not to question.
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