Early on, Wiesel describes how, as he arrived at Auschwitz, he saw live babies and children being thrown into a burning pit. This experience blotted out his faith in God. Most of the women, children, and elders were designated for the gas chambers. He describes how SS officers carried out “selection” procedures in which inmates were forced to run naked before doctors in order to see who was still healthy despite subsisting on starvation scraps of food. Unhealthy inmates were sent to the gas chambers.
The Holocaust has always represented a serious philosophical problem for me. How could one of the most civilized countries in the world elect as its chancellor a man like Adolf Hitler — who made it clear that he intended to eliminate the Jews? How could so many people be so deeply involved in the rounding up of Jews and others, the transportation to hideous concentration camps, and the operation of those camps in the most vicious and brutal way? How could so many people stand by and do nothing?
I am one of those who tends to believe in human progress. Throughout history, people have developed legal and moral principles which seem to make society safer and more compassionate. Yet during the Holocaust there was a violent reversion to bestiality of unprecedented ferocity. Could it be that my belief in progress is false?
The philosopher Hannah Arendt, in her book, “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” posed a theory called “The Banality of Evil.” Using Adolf Eichmann as her example, she pointed to the way in which ordinary Germans carried out the Holocaust by going about their daily jobs, obeying orders, and not questioning authority. Her message was that modern societies are capable of the same thing if individuals lose their basic sense of responsibility, decency, and guilt.
Some thinkers such as Richard Rubenstein suggest that the proper response to the Holocaust must be a rejection of belief in God. He asks how Jews could believe in a God that would let this happen.
Rubenstein and others are countered by the philosopher Emile Fackenheim, whose writings on the Holocaust provide a possible answer, even for those who are not Jews or who do not believe in God.
Fackenheim points out that Jews recognize 613 commandments set forth in the Torah. He proposes a 614th. I will paraphrase it as: “Thou shalt not let Hitler win.” Fackenheim says that if Jews surrender their belief in God, if they surrender their identity as Jews, if they surrender their solidarity as a people, then Hitler has won posthumous victories.
For me as a non-Jew, there is much validity in the philosophy of Emil Fackenheim. If I accept the despair and nihilism of the Holocaust, I am led to believe that man is fundamentally evil in a mindless world without purpose. But then Hitler will have won and so also will the Skinheads, the Klansmen, the neo-fascists, the jihadists, and the other haters. If I stand for brotherhood, compassion, decency, and humanity, and if others stand with me, then Hitler is defeated and so are his children.
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