'The Reader'

In college, I once got into a healthy, friendly debate with a sister of a girl I was dating about how Nazi soldiers and German citizens could sit back and watch the Holocaust take place? 

What was their level of culpability? 

I don’t remember my stance on the subject at the time, but considering I was an opinionated, hot-headed college kid delving deep into the Holocaust, I found it unconsciounable that anyone from that era in France, Germany, Austria, Poland or the Soviet Union could not know what was happening and how they could live with that. 

I’ve gone back and forth on the subject and despite all the atrocities over the globe, nothing haunts me and makes me think like Europe between 1933-1945. I think it’s a unique time and place and I think citizens have attempted to come to grips with what happened ever since. 

The documentary Shoah is a creepy, sprawling film that interviews survivors of the Holocaust and even former Nazis, who perpetrated deaths of millions. Still, the most fascinating interviews are those of the random citizens that lived adjacent to killing machines and billowing smokestacks of crematoriums. Most readily admit they knew something was happening. Maybe it’s plausible deniability. Maybe they genuinely thought people were being shipped away for relocation or labor camps. 

My current opinion is that the Holocaust was too gigantic for anyone to truly comprehend what was happening. I think people in these villages and towns saw their six Jewish families expelled. I think they saw it as a cost of war. I think they saw it as good riddance to a tanner or cobbler who had charged them too much. Like it was karma. 

They did not see it as a machine or six million dead. Guilty, yes. Responsible for the biggest travesty of the modern world? Certainly not. 

This middle ground or purgatory is probably what makes survivors and the generations after so crazy. 

This is pretty much the synopsis of The Reader. A really great book that was turned into a really great movie without spoiling or ruining anything. The most telling part comes during the trial of Hanna, when the defendants began to rationalize their part in a church fire that killed multitudes of Jewish prisoners. 

Others denied everything, but Hanna’s excuse – that she can’t read – would have made her less culpable, but the shame of being illiterate was too great for her to tell the truth.