Jacob Mikanowski: evaluation

Transcript context

…All the study of Eastern Europe, all the time that you spent there — Greater Poland, earlier Greater Lithuania, maybe Greater Serbia, Greater Albania, Greater Hungary: How has it shaped your view of just human nature, flat out? Is it that you think, “Well, what I see in Eastern Europe is a bit of an outlier,” or do you actually start seeing the rest of the world more in those terms? How has it shaped your general views of humanity? If I can give you a little longer answer: It has shaped a view of humanity, but the part that has the most isn’t the kind of petty — I think a little bit petty — national aspirations. It’s not Lithuanian dreams of getting a little bit of Poland back or Hungarian dreams of getting the Bačka back. The part that’s really struck me deeply is the Holocaust. My family, a lot of them went through the Holocaust in Poland. And studying the German occupation of especially Poland, where the Jews were so much, and the process — what happened there after the ghetto clearances, after ’41: I think that there’s a real message about human nature there. Sometimes it’s — people who talk about that will talk about, “Well, this is a Polish-Jewish thing. This is about anti-Semitism.” I think there’s actually something deeper. There are three phases to the Holocaust in Poland. There’s an early phase of people are being rounded up and put into ghettos. Then, in 1941, the Germans invade the Soviet Union and a few months there’s Operation Barbarossa and a few months later they start clearing the ghettos out. They start the real process of eliminating Poland’s Jews and outright shooting people as they’re invading and rounding people up, taking them from ghettos to concentration camps where they’re gassed and killed. Then there’s this period — so that’s when most of the actual murder and death happens. Then, from late 1941 to early 1945, there’s a small group of survivors in Poland, Polish Jews, who are in peril from all sides, have no legal standing, are nonpersons, can be hunted by anyone, can be killed by anyone, and have to find a way to survive in a true Hobbesian world and where food is becoming scarcer and scarcer, money is scarcer. Everything is scarce. In a real world of poverty. Because they’re surviving, usually, in — Some people have false papers and can survive anywhere, hopefully, as long as they’re not denounced. Some people have a lot of money and use that for themselves. But the ones who escaped from the ghetto or ran away from transports or were otherwise just out at sea in Poland have to usually make a bargain with somebody. Have to find someone they can trade whatever they have, whatever money they have, whatever they can promise for shelter — and they do. A lot of people did that. It’s hard to know exactly how many, but a lot of people did that in ’42. Then the war goes on and on and on, much longer than people expected: ’42, ’43, ’44. Winter after winter, things getting harder and harder. The longer that runs, the more this becomes a real experiment in human nature. Who survives and who doesn’t? Who is denounced and who doesn’t? I had family members who actually survived this way, miraculously, but some didn’t. In the short run, a lot of people will make that bargain and be like, “I’ll take your money, and I’ll put you up. I’ll put you in my cellar. actually survived this way, miraculously, but some didn’t. In the short run, a lot of people will make that bargain and be like, “I’ll take your money, and I’ll put you up. I’ll put you in my cellar. I’ll hide you in a room for a few months, for a year, for two years.” But the longer that goes, the riskier it becomes and the harder it becomes and the more there’s the temptation to say, “Actually, I’m going to give you up. My neighbors can see this. I can’t go on with this. I need the money. I’m too scared. Doesn’t seem like a point. Everyone’s dead.” If the war had been shorter, a lot more people would have been saved. The longer the war runs, the more people are either denounced by their neighbors or their own protectors denounce them. But the ones who are saved, in the long run: this is where the human nature comes in, what’s so interesting, is the — How do you know who to trust? The people who end up protecting the people they protect the longest, hold out the longest, hold out to the end, are usually people who live on the absolute margins: widows, outcasts, people with no money, people in terrible shape, people whose lives would be transformed by having an iron stove or a pair of pants. But if you were to take that when you were hiding Jews, and you were to take their money and buy something like that, immediately all your neighbors would know what you’re doing, because every village is 100 eyes watching everybody else. You make one move, you make one change, you buy a tin roof: everyone knows what you’re doing. Everyone knows you’re hiding a Jew. The people who were the best at saving the people they saved tended to be people who never made a bargain, who never asked for money, who just did it out of moral instinct. Because if you buy a life, you can sell it. The people who didn’t enter into that transaction, they held fast the strongest. But how would you know that? Because just as possible, those people kind of on the margins, they can denounce someone for a tiny reward: for a bottle of vodka, for a kilo of sugar. Those are some of the rewards that people gave for Jews. If you were to ask them beforehand, “How would you act in this situation? What would you do?” I don’t think they’d have any idea what they would do. I don’t think they could predict themselves how they would act. That’s where you get at the human mystery. I think you don’t know: Some people have that moral instinct. Some people will do it out of an innate feeling, but most won’t. To me, that means human nature is in some ways completely plastic, has no bottom, has no backside. Most people in the right situation — in the wrong situation, the worst situation — will act in any way, behave in any way. I think there’s almost no bottom to human behavior. The flip side of that is, in the worst situation, some people will act in the most remarkable way, in the best way. There’s kind of no way to know. To me, although I’m not primarily a historian of the Holocaust, that’s the lesson I take away. I’m sorry for a very long answer.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.