Allow me to take you to Bergen-Belsen. It is only about four hours from here and in the war it is not the worst Nazi camp. There are no gas chambers, anyone who ends up as a Jew soon says afterwards that it was not that bad. But there is beating, there is forced labour, prisoners are without rights. In 1944 the hunger and the typhus come, the body cart drives back and forth.
There we arrive. Imagine it. How are we holding up?
We are probably doing our best to preserve our civilization. Abel Herzberg notices this to his fellow inmates, most of them are not angry. In the misery of the camp they only do more and more harm. They fight at the sinks and steal at life. Bring each other down and lose themselves in it.
lawlessness
This creeping decline gives Herzberg and a few fellow inmates, lawyers like him, the idea to remind the camp of civilization. They open a court. In their lawlessness they will judge. With a prosecutor and a defense, around a suspect who, for example, stole bread. You can excuse that, because he’s hungry. But whoever he robs is also hungry, so the apology falls away. There must be a penalty.
During the sessions, on Sunday afternoons between the barracks, Herzberg sees half the camp walk out again and again. There is shouting, prisoners join in the deliberations screaming, and at the same time there is the seriousness of a Court of Cassation in a constitutional state. With the unlikely reward that sometimes the camp commander joins the public, an SS man, who comes to listen to what he no longer knows. “The first sentence of human civilization,” as Herzberg puts it. “The recognition that there is something that is allowed and something that is not.”
Never again an injustice of millions who would not be worth living on the basis of passport or ‘race’
I tell you this story because it doesn’t let go of me every time I read it. I hear a biblical kind of admonition and hope you hear it too. It’s not that you can say justice won here – after a few months, the court was helplessly lost in diarrhea and exhaustion. But you feel that something had happened after all. Even in camp life in 1944 it turned out to be possible not to resign yourself to the circumstances and to give yourself an assignment. Determine what is not allowed and live it.
The scope of that way of thinking, not only in Bergen-Belsen but in so many places in belligerent Europe, became apparent after the liberation. An order followed from the destruction. Never again an injustice of millions who would not be worth living on the basis of passport or ‘race’. Never again a war like this. Nie wieder, plus jamais ça, never again† In the formerly occupied countries, the rule of law was restored and expanded with unprecedented seriousness. Civilization won.
Model Citizens
Initially, this helped to have confidence that the winners of the war were indeed civilized. Very different from the Germans, who were monsters, of course. But that distinction faded. The winners continued to wage wars beyond civilization, while the Germans emerged as model citizens of Europe.
The question also arose as to whether the Germans had all been so monstrous during the war. Many seemed to have dutifully done their job without realizing what kind of system they were in. In the office, in the factory, they did as they were told, and was that so different from how it was done in other countries? How many agencies in our own dear country had not contributed to the German yoke?
It came to be called the ‘banality of evil’. Evil that doesn’t look that way, hidden as it is in rules and routines – and there went the bright idea of civilization. If man does not see his own evil, how do you hold on to what is and is not allowed?
Abel Herzberg already asks this question in Bergen-Belsen. He sees how people screen with what is and is not allowed and then make the mistake themselves. He gets it too, in the upheaval of the barracks. But it affects the core of the law he aims at. Sometimes straight, a bit right, that’s not right.
You can see what Herzberg is going to look for in the people he sets his eye on. A rabbi, for example, who is constantly beaten up by camp guards because of his rabbi’s beard. Shave off anyway, everyone says. It does not work.
Or a schoolmaster who, despite hunger, leaves his soup behind, because it is not according to the dietary laws. Eat up, everyone says. He damned it.
They are people who will never cross their own boundary between what is allowed and what is not allowed. They know it would make their lives easier and do their bodies good. But not their souls, they would lose it, and you see Herzberg recognize that. He finds a similar principle. Not in God but in the law – and he also absolutely sticks to it, no matter how tough the camp gets.
Also read the May 4 lecture of 2021, by Roxane van Iperen: Voices from the deep
Compass
A cousin of his in Bergen-Belsen recalls how Herzberg, as a judge, was offered extra food. „I feel satisfied with the portion on which I straight have,” he says, and his cousin is flabbergasted. “What strength from someone who is so hungry.”
Perhaps that is what I most wanted to tell you tonight. That this existed. As it also existed with many resistance fighters, people in hiding, in miniature with so many others. That flawless compass for good and evil. It’s what we tell each other on May 4th every year, that it existed, and I notice over the years that it actually only becomes more essential for me. Now that my mom and dad are gone, who’s going to honor it if I don’t?
Is that how we want to proceed? And if not, are we going to do something about it?
That necessity suddenly overwhelms us with the news. A superpower attacks a neighboring country, just in our Europe. The violence affects civilians. Millions are at risk of being deprived of justice. For generations we hoped to drift away from it to a new future, never again, but we fall through time, it seems like 1939, and now it comes down to us – to our compass for good and evil. As if we never do otherwise, we take in refugees and send weapons. Justice must win here.
And yet there are the opposing forces. Also in our country. In the name of that right, companies support sanctions against the aggressor, but in the meantime ask the ministry whether they should not be an exception. That ministry also supports the sanctions, but has been moderately successful in executing them. There are practical objections and sometimes, yes, also laws.
They were only recently called in to create a pleasant business climate for the money of that aggressor, which we already knew at the time was thieves’ money. Now that we are looking with a new eye on what is not allowed, it appears that we are stuck with rules and routines that pretend to be the law, but lack the spirit of it. The banality of evil – you don’t even need Nazism for it.
Is that how we want to proceed? And if not, are we going to do something about it?
Before you sit here again next year, for another edifying word, I hope you think back to the voices between the Bergen-Belsen barracks that on Sunday afternoons in 1944 awakened the spirit of justice again. To remember civilization. If that was possible then, it is always possible.
This text was pronounced on Wednesday 4 May 2022 in the Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam on the occasion of Remembrance Day.
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