Re-thinking the face of evil

I watched an episode of CSI:New York last week. No big newsflash there - the show has been one of my obsessions for a few years now.

Last week was the Yahrzeit episode, about people selling off Holocaust items. Starring Ed Asner, it was, as expected, by turns touching and shocking, action-packed and introspective.

Ed Asner never fails to deliver, and he has this character down pat: the concentration camp survivor who wishes to simply move on and forget the past, surrounded by a society which wishes to commemorate it.

And yet, in a really stunning reversal, his character is revealed in the last few moments to be nothing like the persona he has played for a lifetime. Without spoiling the details, I will say that the moment Asner looks up at Detective Mac Taylor (whose father was an American soldier liberating concentrations camps) and speaks in German is a chilling one: one that resonates long after the final credits have run.

And that moment made me think today (while doing a fairly repetitive task) about evil.

Perhaps what is most shocking, still, about the Holocaust is the banality, the every-day ordinariness of it. I know that people will protest that term. It was an incalculable horror, unimaginable in its scope and execution. More than 6 million people put to death is a number we can hardly grasp the edges of, much less the whole.

But the people who perpetuated most of that horror did it, at least originally, ONE PERSON AT A TIME. It wasn't until late in the Third Reich that mass gassings were performed. Most of the atrocities - the beatings, rapes, starvations, petty cruelties, de-humanizing and degrading actions - were performed against individuals by individuals.

Hitler had a grand plan, but the bureaucrats, officers, and soldiers who herded Jews, gypsies, gays, and the 'mentally deficient' out of their homes and onto the trains looked each one in the eye, pointed them towards life or death, and choose to act in horrific inhuman ways. Neighbours, co-workers, even family members picked and chose: betrayed this one and not that, reported suspicious activity knowing the possible consequences, sold out people who worked and lived and taught and learned beside them every day.

It may be some kind of excuse: "We didn't know what was being done." But they knew people disappeared in the middle of the night and never came back. They knew houses were torn down, possessions were trucked out. They knew men with guns walked down the street and left sorrow and fear behind them.

And they did nothing.

Sometimes, evil is the sum total of all that nothing.