Fr Billy Swan
In the first part of this reflection on the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, I highlighted the importance of probing the philosophical underpinnings of the Nazi regime that allowed it to justify the atrocities it committed. This moral critique is essential if the crimes against humanity committed in Auschwitz and other death camps are not to happen again. In this second part of the reflection, the spotlight falls on the presence and power of evil that gave us Auschwitz as a permanent witness to man’s inhumanity to man.
I have visited Auschwitz twice. They were difficult visits with one dark memory after another - the wall of death where thousands were lined up and shot; the room containing thousands of shoes, belongings and human hair of victims; Joseph Mengele’s laboratories where he performed grotesque experiments on human beings; the starvation bunker where St Maximillian Kolbe died; the gas chambers that still have finger-nail marks on the walls caused by desperate people gasping for breath as they suffocated from Zyklon – B gas.
This was the place where mass murder was carried out every day on an industrial scale. It was a place where evil practises were normalised and formed part of a daily routine. Part of the tour of Auschwitz was a visit to the offices of the SS officers where files were kept on inmates and where the camp was organised. In one room there was a desk and a chair. On the desk remained a family photo of an SS officer and his family. Questions screamed in my head: “Whoever this officer was, he seemed to care for his family. Yet his work was the extermination of countless families. How could he be so blind?”; “How could so many people be so complicit in erecting and sustaining such an edifice of evil?”
As I grappled with these questions, the title of a biography of Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann, came to mind. He was one of the managers of Auschwitz who escaped to Buenos Aires after the war ended. Eichmann was traced by the Mossad in 1960, returned to Israel, put on trial and executed for his war crimes. The biography was aptly named ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil’ by Hannah Arendt. Here was a man who by all accounts was a loving father to his children, a husband to his wife and yet was the director of mass murder. It was as if he was living the ultimate double life – on one hand caring to certain people and on the other a brutal executioner of others.
But eighty years on from Auschwitz, the questions remain: ‘How prevalent is the mystery of evil in human nature and do we underestimate it? Are we prone to normalising evil like the Nazis did and making it so banal that we are blind to see it, like Adolf Eichmann?’
One man who helps answer these questions is the Russian Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) who survived the horrors of the war and atrocities - not committed by the Nazis, but by the Soviets. He gave a famous address at Harvard University on 8th June 1978 entitled ‘World Split Apart’. In that address, Solzhenitsyn shocked his listeners by insisting that despite the terrible events of the war, Westerners no longer understood evil and therefore would prove themselves powerless against it. He warned: ‘The forces of Evil have begun their decisive offensive. They may well bury Western civilization forever’.
For Solzhenitsyn, these forces of evil are not external, cultural or social as others had argued. Take for example Karl Marx, the father of Communism who argued that evil and crime are merely responses to flawed social conditions and economic injustices; or John Locke who argued that evil can be eliminated with a proper education. No, insisted Solzhenitsyn. The problem with these theories is that ‘humanistic thinking does not admit the existence of intrinsic evil in man. Not does it see any task higher than the attainment of happiness on earth’. Rather, ‘the tilt of human freedom toward evil has come about gradually…but it evidently stems from a humanistic and benevolent concept according to which man - maker of the world - does not bear any evil within himself and all the defects of life are caused by misguided social systems’ (World Split Apart’).
For Solzhenitsyn, the most significant battleground is not the political or legislative landscape but rather the terrain of the individual human soul and its powerful capacity for good and evil. He continued: ‘The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts’ (The Gulag Archipelago).
Here we see a remarkable parallel between his words and those of Jesus who taught that ‘what goes into someone’s mouth does not defile them, but what comes out of their mouth, that is what defiles them…But the things that come out of a person’s mouth come from the heart, and these defile them…For out of the heart come evil thoughts—murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander’ (Matt. 15:11, 18-19).
It was the territory of the human heart that Jesus targeted as most in need of conversion in order to combat the mystery of evil and inaugurate the kingdom of God. It is this timeless truth that Solzhenitsyn pointed out in that landmark speech, speaking as a victim and a survivor, not just of regimes but of the worst of human cruelty that created them.
It was for this reason that Pope Benedict XVI rightly pointed out to all generations that ‘the principles governing political and social life are intimately linked to a moral order based on the dominion of God the Creator’ (Pope Benedict XVI, The White House, Washington DC, 2008). In other words, there is a moral order at the heart of civilization that recognizes the moral principles of justice, mercy and truth. John Adams, one of the founding fathers of the United States, once said that: ‘Our Constitution was made only for moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other’. Therefore, while politics, policies and laws are the bricks that make up our society, the mortar that holds it all together is the faith and moral fibre of the people of the nation. For if moral integrity goes missing, civilization begins to unravel, no matter who is in power.
Here is a warning for governments who persist with the unimpeded liberalisation of societies and the accommodation of absolute human freedom. For when we lose sight of our capacity for harm and the human lust to dominate, then the common good rapidly deteriorates. Positivity must not replace realism.
This is what the poet and playwright T.S. Eliot warned after the First World War with these words:
‘By destroying traditional social habits of the people, by dissolving their natural collective consciousness into individual constituents, by licensing the opinions of the most foolish, by substituting instruction for education, by encouraging cleverness rather than wisdom, the upstart rather than the qualified, by fostering a notion of getting on to which the alternative is a hopeless apathy, Liberalism can prepare the way for that which is its own negation: the artificial, mechanised or brutalised control which is a desperate remedy for its chaos’ (T.S. Eliot, Christianity and Culture).
The problem with both Nazi ideology and Communism boils down to the elimination of God followed by the oppressive replacement of God with the whims of the powerful. In another famous address by Solzhenitsyn, this time at Templeton in 1983, he said:
‘But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous Revolution that swallowed up some sixty million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: ‘Men have forgotten God’; that’s why all this has happened’.
Friends, we live in a time when the memory of God is being forgotten and will be forgotten unless brave souls are willing to keep the memory of God alive. For if we forget about God and try to live as if he does not exist, then there is a real danger of evil acts being committed. There is also danger of evil taking hold in a way that appears banal and even normal, blinding us to its very existence under our noses and before our eyes.
Our Christian faith trains us to resist evil, starting by acknowledging its presence in our hearts and revealing our need for God’s grace to heal our human nature damaged by sin and prone to evil. Our call to holiness and greatness of soul refuses to compromise on sin and the evil expressions of it. This is the key to a better world. Otherwise, the calls of ‘Never again” at future holocaust memorials will ring hollow and promise a false dawn.
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