by Ervin Staub
First, we might wonder how different it all might have been if the German population or the rest of the world had shown a strong response – boycotts and other retaliation and threat of punitive action – or had simply expressed outrage in the course of the Jews’ increasing mistreatment. Second, our judgment of the victims’ behavior will very much depend on our perspective. We can focus on their passivity: “allowing” themselves to be gathered, murdered, or worked to death as slaves. We can focus on their attempts to evade and at times resist the killers and to maintain human dignity in the camps. And we can attempt to understand their psychological experience.
Jews frequently acted when an effective response to the threat was possible. Psychological coping mechanisms, like denial, might have slowed their leaving Germany, but over 60 percent of Jews who lived in Germany in 1933 had left by October 1941, when immigration was forbidden. The same proportion of Austrian Jews fled between the German takeover of Austria in 1938 and October 1941, “exploiting all means – legal and illegal – available. A study of those remaining in Worms in October 1941 indicated that the overwhelming majority had emigration plans and had applied for visas; almost all applied to the United States, which rigidly restricted immigrants.”30 They had nowhere to go.
About three-fourths of Estonian Jews, the only group of Baltic Jews that had an extended period of time between threat to their nation and full occupation, fled to the interior of the Soviet Union in 1941. Dutch Jews did not passively wait to be rounded up. According to a German report of August 3, 1941, only one of five Jews reported when called up, and the rest left their homes and went into hiding.31 I described some of the actions of the Belgian Jews. Jews extensively participated in resistance movements in occupied territories, often under assumed names so that they would not endanger their families. In many countries, they participated in resistance more than the native population, especially the Zionists, socialists, and communists among them. In some places, strong anti-Semitism made it difficult for Jews to join the resistance. For a Jew to join the Polish underground, he had to lie and pretend to be a non-Jew.32
In the Warsaw ghetto, nearly unimaginable suffering due to hunger, disease, isolation, and the slow death of an immense number of people crowded into a small area was followed by the deportation to the death camps of 320,000 Jews between July and September 1942. Left behind were younger people, some of them former Zionists, used for slave labor. Their families had been deported and were therefore not subject to retaliation. Doubts about Nazi intentions were gone. It is under these conditions that the Warsaw uprising began. It was delayed by the refusal of Polish resistance organizations to aid the revolt. The revolt began on April 19,1943. After four weeks of fighting, the Germans penetrated the bunker of the central command. To destroy the remaining Jews without further losses of their own, they burnt down the ghetto.
In the camps, although there were different modes of adaptation, many prisoners actively engaged with their environment rather than passively succumbing to it. Escape or resistance was made extremely difficult by hunger, brutalization, diminished life drives, extremely low probability of success, and examples of terrible punishment. While relatively rare, there were escapes and uprisings at Treblinka, Auschwitz-Birkenau, and Sobibor. According to many accounts, the prisoners who survived learned to dissemble – for example, to save their strength by not working but appearing to do so. Inmates continued to care for themselves, to try to keep clean.33 While it varied in the camps how much prisoners competed with each other for scarce resources or maintained solidarity, under conditions that clearly favored the former, bonding and solidarity were frequent.34
The psychology of victims
Many influences affected the victims’ experience and state of mind. The perception of reality is a construction from “objective” elements, the reality “out-there,” and past experience, personality (and the nature of one’s group), and current needs. Intense threat or danger can lead to psychological maneuvers, usually automatic, that enter into the construction of reality, their purpose to reduce the experience of threat and anxiety.
Freud proposed the idea of defense mechanisms, the screening or altering of our perception of events in the world and our own thoughts and feelings in order to reduce threat and protect the psychological self.35 All of us use defense mechanisms, but their use is intensified when there is severe internal conflict or external threat. Especially when people cannot cope with threat by taking action, they will tend to diminish the feeling of threat through unconscious inner processes that alter perception. Denial is one of the more “primitive” defense mechanisms. It means screening out part of reality or making it unreal in our minds. Rationalization is a less extreme defense – interpreting events in ways that fit our needs and purposes. In 1934 the Nazis eliminated the SA, the perpetrators of many of the early attacks on Jews; many Jews almost realistically interpreted this as a sign of a better future.
The denial of an obvious reality is a sign of psychosis. Usually, however, reality or at least its meaning is not so obvious, and differing interpretations are possible. As I noted, the Nazis’ own motivation for genocide evolved with increasing mistreatment of Jews. An accurate perception or reality in the Germany of the mid-1930s would have suggested extreme danger, but not impending genocide. However, adding consideration of Hitler’s written and spoken words would have made genocide a realistic possibility.
When the Nazis came to power, Jews were uncertain about their fate. Uncertainty creates great anxiety. Thus, they even welcomed the initial laws that “clarified” their status – the Nuremberg laws. According to Hannah Arendt, many Jews continued to cling to the belief that the original program of the National Socialist Party, enunciated in 1920 and never officially abandoned, expressed the Nazis’ true intentions.36 This program contained provisions that in 1920 expressed severe anti-Semitism, but now seemed mild: second-class citizenship for Jews and their exclusion from the civil service and the press.
We do not know the extent that defenses distorted the Jews’ perception of reality. Given the progressive increase in persecution, it was possible to see each anti-Jewish measure as the last one. Most likely, defenses delayed the attempts of some Jews to leave Germany and face a new, unfamiliar world and contributed to disbelief of the initial rumors and fragmentary information about the camps and the killings and even of more specific information about the fate of the deported. Such information was so threatening that it had to be kept away from the center of consciousness.
The knowledge that an enemy intends to kill us and there are no effective means to protect ourselves can be unbearable. Belief in a just world, that innocent people do not suffer intense persecution, also entered as a defense. Dutch Jews believed before the war that the German Jews, whom they disliked, must have done something terrible to bring about such persecution.37 Accounts by concentration camp survivors indicate that even in the camps many could not take in the reality of their situation and kept themselves psychologically removed from it.38
The behavior of bystanders contributed to despair and hopelessness.e In Germany, where Jews regarded themselves fully German, they felt deeply betrayed. Isolated in many countries, abandoned and without support, often persecuted by their own countrymen, facing a brutal enemy who did everything to weaken life drives and inhibit Jews from uniting, they had to feel utterly helpless. People rarely act if they believe that their action will have no effect in reaching a desired goal. A goal itself – escape, resistance, or revenge – does not usually arise without some hope that it can be fulfilled.
In animals as well as humans, the inability to protect oneself leads to a state of helplessness – for example, dogs stop attempting to avoid or escape electric shocks if they have been repeatedly unsuccessful. Many studies show that humans also learn to give up unsuccessful efforts and become passive and depressed.39
The psychological state and behavior of victims was also affected by the German practice of collective retribut
ion. In 1942, five Germans were killed in Berlin by a group of Jewish communists. In retaliation, the Gestapo executed 250 Jews, deported another 250, and threatened to kill 250 more for every German killed in the future.40 In 1941, Jewish action groups killed a member of the Defense Troop created by the fascistic National Society and Movement of the Netherland. The Germans arrested 425 Jewish men, deported them to Mathausen, tortured them, and worked them to death.41
All along the Jews were deprived of individuality, treated as an anonymous mass. I have pointed out that deindividuation freed perpetrators from moral constraints. But the effect of the loss of individual identity in a group depends on the context. It can ease killing or it can lead to passively marching to a gas chamber.f
When Jews had support or opportunities, for example, allies in the native population, they became active in evasion, escape, and resistance. Certain conditions, as in the Warsaw ghetto, fostered unity and group action. But conditions were mostly conducive to passivity. Many Jews must have progressed along a continuum of victimization and abandoned themselves to the currents that invariably led to destruction.
The power of heroic bystanders
Many lines of evidence indicate the tremendous potential of bystanders to influence events: in emergencies, the words and actions of witnesses affect others’ definition of the situation and response; the population brought the euthanasia policy to an end in Germany; different attitudes and behavior by local populations and their leaders in European countries resulted in Jewish death or survival.
The extraordinary power of bystanders was apparent in the village of Le Chambon. The inhabitants of this Huguenot village in Vichy France saved several thousand Jews, most of them children, despite a penalty of deportation or death for sheltering Jews. They were led by their pastor, Andre Trocme, who had a firm belief in nonviolence and the sanctity of life. Their willingness to sacrifice themselves had great impact even on would-be perpetrators, such as the police and the military. It became common for strange voices to call on the telephone in the presbytery to tell of an impending raid. This enabled the inhabitants to send the refugees they were harboring into the nearby forests.
As the Resistance in Le Chambon developed, a curious phenomenon was taking place there: many of the Vichy police were being “converted” (as Trocme puts it in his notes) to helping the Chambonnais and their Jews. Even as the official policy of the Vichy toward Le Chambon and the Jews was hardening, individuals among the police and the bureaucrats of Vichy were more and more frequently resisting their orders to catch or hurt people who had done no visible harm to anyone. They found themselves helping those who were trying to save these innocent, driven creatures. Caring was infectious.42
When the doctor Le Forester was accused, tried, and executed as an example to the villagers, his deeds and the words he spoke at his trial influenced a German officer, Major Smelling, who persuaded Colonel Metzger, the head of the infamous Farber Legion of the SS, not to move against the village.
I heard the words of Dr. Le Forester, who was a Christian and explained to me very clearly why you were all disobeying our orders in Le Chambon. I believed that your doctor was sincere. I am a good Catholic, you understand, and I can grasp these things... .Well, Colonel Metzger was a hard one, and he kept on insisting that we move in on Le Chambon. But I kept telling him to wait. I told Metzger that this kind to resistance had nothing to do with violence, nothing to do with anything we could destroy with violence. With all my personal and military power I opposed sending his legion into Le Chambon.43
What is the psychological basis of this kind of influence? Helpful bystanders provide a different definition of reality. They break the uniformity of views and call attention to values disregarded by perpetrators and passive bystanders. They affirm the humanity of the victims. If they themselves are not devalued by perpetrators, they set a standard and also invoke a deep-seated human desire to be well regarded by others.
Heroic rescuers
Some people risked their own lives to save Jews and others persecuted by the Nazis. Among the bleak memories of the Holocaust, their actions offer hope for the future. Some of these rescuers and the rescued have been interviewed, either in the 1960s or recently.44 The interviews show that many of them had parents with strong moral concerns that they transmitted to their children. As a result, these rescuers were motivated both by a desire to fulfill moral and humanitarian values and by dislike of the Nazi system. Many valued caring or felt empathy for those who suffer. Other rescuers responded to the plight of one victim, often a friend or an acquaintance, and then continued to help others. In some instances a person began to help after witnessing the murder or brutal treatment of a Jew, or the Jews’ evident suffering. One person repeatedly noticed a group of ragtag Jewish children on his street. He was aware that they could be arrested and taken away anytime. A characteristic of many rescuers was “inclusiveness,” the tendency to apply caring, moral values and standards of right and wrong to people in different social, ethnic, or religious groups.45
Some rescuers had already shown in their earlier lives that they were unusually fearless, self-confident, and adventurous. Personal goal theory suggests that adventurousness may have been a contributing motive for resistance against the Nazis.46 Oscar Schindler and Raoul Wallenberg were both men of action who gained satisfaction from exercising their skills and personal power in confrontation with the Nazis.
Another reported characteristic of some rescuers was marginality: being a member of a minority religion (Huguenot in the case of Le Chambon), being new to the community, having a parent from another country, or some other source of social separateness that allowed a different perspective and reduced fear of risking one’s relationship with the majority group.47 Many rescuers, however, were closely tied to some group. Samuel and Pearl Oliner, in a major study of rescuers, found many rescuers “normocentric,” or norm-centered, characterized by a “feeling of obligation to a special reference group with whom the actor identified and whose explicit and implicit values he feels obliged to obey.”48 The reference groups included religious, political, and resistance groups, family or friends. Sometimes these rescuers helped when authorities in the group (e.g., priests or resistance leaders) or other members directed, persuaded, or in other ways influenced them. At other times, they responded when events called forth their internalized group norms. The position taken by their group or implied by its norms led these rescuers to deviate from the majority.
This type of motivation was frequent and is highly significant, especially when a large social group supports it, as in the case of Belgium. Social defense networks developed and helping became the norm. However, such motivation can be unreliable. Individual helpers do not necessarily care about the fate of the victims, but are guided by the stance of the group or its leaders. Resistance groups and local church groups sometimes influenced their members to help, but some priests and church authorities (e.g., in Poland) urged their flocks to support Nazi policies of extermination, and some resistance groups killed Jews.49
The Oliners found that most rescuers in their study, not only normocentric ones, felt connected to other human beings, whether family, a group, or people in general. In contrast, the passive, nonhelping bystanders, members of a comparison group they interviewed, tended to be disconnected. Repeated helping by most rescuers, over long periods of time, must have strengthened their experience of connection. Seventy percent of the rescuers first helped in response to a request, by either the person in need or an intermediary. Most of them continued to help. According to personal goal theory, motives for helping become active in response to activating conditions. Requests might have led rescuers to appreciate the mortal danger of Jews or called forth important values or exerted pressure.
As I have mentioned, in many instances there was an evolution of commitment to help by steps along a continuum of benevolence. People who agreed to hide some Jews briefly went on to care for them for years. A person who responded to the nee
d of a friend continued by helping strangers.
The evolution of Oscar Schindler was dramatic.50 He was a German born in Czechoslovakia who, although not a committed Nazi, became a member of the Nazi Party. An opportunist, he followed the German army into Poland in 1939, took over a confiscated Jewish factory, and proceeded to enrich himself with Jewish slave labor.
But contrary to others in this position, in many ways he treated Jews who worked for him like human beings. He indulged in small acts of kindness and consideration, followed by more significant acts. To protect his Jewish slave laborers from the dangers of their brutal camp, he created his own camp. He began to endanger his own life in order to help and continued to help even after he was arrested and released. As the Russians approached, he moved the laborers to his hometown in Czechoslovakia and set up a factory that produced nothing but served as camouflage to protect the Jews. Eventually, he sacrificed all his possessions while saving the lives of twelve hundred Jews.
Schindler’s intense sympathy for Jews was evidenced in many acts, one of which stands out because it was so uncharacteristic of this elegant dandy and bon vivant. Once when he visited his “friend,” Amos Goeth, the commandant of the camp at Plaszow, a train filled with Jews was standing by in the burning sun. Terrible sounds of distress and pain emanated from it. Schindler grabbed a nearby hose and started to water down the wagons, to the tolerant amusement of the SS guards.