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| Afterword |
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| Bearing Witness |
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The story is not ended, it has not yet become history, and the
secret life it holds can break out tomorrow in you or in me |
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— GERSHOM SCHOLEM |
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I complete this book with many different feelings: relief
at the idea of Nazi doctors no longer inhabiting my study, uneasiness
concerning the limitations of my work, anger toward Nazi killers in general and
Nazi doctors in particular, and a certain satisfaction that I have seen the
effort through. My mind darts back and forth between the sitting rooms in which
I talked to former Nazi doctors and images of Jews lined up for selections at
Auschwitz and mental patients being gassed at killing centers. From the
beginning I have been on guard against letting the sitting rooms block out the
victims.
Yet it was in those sitting rooms that I did a great part of
the research, and did it in a way that required me to view medical
perpetrators, whatever their relationship to evil, as human beings and nothing
else. That meant requiring of myself a form of empathy for Nazi doctors: I had
to imagine my way into their situation, not to exonerate but to seek knowledge
of human susceptibility to evil. The logic of my position was clear enough:
only a measure of empathy, however reservedly offered, could help one grasp the
psychological components of the anti-empathic evil in which many of these Nazi
doctors had engaged.
Yet whatever its logic, it felt strange and
uncomfortable to hold out even minimal empathy (and even with full awareness of
the clear distinction between empathy and sympathy) for participants in a
project so murderous, and one aimed specifically at my own people, at me. If I
never fully resolved the matter, I managed it by understanding my empathy to be
in the service of a critical rendition of those doctors' psychological actions
and experiences. One sometimes enters into another’s situation not to help
but to expose and evaluate motivations and behavior.
Even then, one is
making human contact, avoiding what Erik Erikson |
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