ABSTRACT
The essay deals with a quandary: do perpetrators of evil also exhibit decency? The personal experiences related here have their sitz im leben (setting in life) in Nazi-occupied Polish and Czech Silesia during the Holocaust. This essay will give several examples to explore the complexity of this duality. I have written this essay in an effort to correct authors Raul Hilberg’s and Hannah Arendt’s blatant wholesale misrepresentations of the Nazi Gestapo-installed Jewish Councils and their leaders as corrupt people running organizations that collaborated with the Nazis. This essay’s author contends that such accusations are injurious, gross exaggerations. The 92-year-old author, at the time of this writing, justifies his views by having lived and experienced Nazi occupation for three years prior to his fellow Jews’ deportation to death in 1942 and subsequently for three further years in seven concentration camps. He writes as a Holocaust survivor, son of a chairperson of the Judenrat (Jewish Council) of Teschen, and quite possibly the last eyewitness to that place and period in occupied Polish Silesia. In conclusion, the author wonders whether theological approaches to the problem of coexistence of extreme evil and good within one person are adequate. If not, he considers whether psychology might be helpful in making sense of this human phenomenon, which is not just Jewish, but universal. The essay ends with the suggestion that enlightened ethics education is the only means to making good triumph over evil.
