The Joy of Pain (28 page)

[F]rom your uniform I can infer that you're shallow, ignorant, and naïve about the Jews. Your line that the party rants on about is … is … how … how inferior they are some … some … some species. … I keep saying how wrong that is. They are sublimely clever. And they are intelligent as well. My indictments of that race are stronger and heavier because they are real, not your uneducated ideology. … They are arrogant and self-obsessed and calculating and they reject the Christ and I'll not have them pollute German blood … he doesn't understand … deal with the reality of the Jew, and the world will applaud us. Treat them as … as imaginary fantasy evil, human fantasy, and the world will have justified contempt for us. To kill them casually without regard for the law martyrs them … it will be their victory … when you have my credentials, then we'll talk about who loves the Jew and who hates them.
⁵⁵

Stuckart, in this albeit
imagined
dialogue, breaks through the absurd logic of those in the room who use their distorted beliefs of the inferiority of the Jews to bolster their case for annihilation. He still wants them purged, with a passion unsurpassed by anyone in the room, however. He manages to justify this desire by embracing other negative stereotypes about Jews, as Glick's perspective on envious prejudice would predict. These attributes seem enough for
even Stuckart to discount the role envy may play in his hatred toward these “sublimely clever” people.

Through interviews and memoirs, survivors of the Holocaust leave no doubt about the pleasure many Nazis and some Germans displayed over the suffering of the Jews. It is more difficult to know the origins of this pleasure. By reading these accounts and applying to them what we know about human emotion and behavior, I think many clues can be uncovered.
⁵⁶
In one account,
Soldiers and Slaves
, Roger Cohen, columnist for
The New York Times
, describes a series of events that played out toward the end of World War II.
⁵⁷
Cohen follows the wretched experiences of a group of about 350 men who were sent to the small East German town of Berga to build an underground fuel-making factory. It was a preposterous plan that had no realistic prospects of succeeding, but Germany was in desperate need of gasoline for its war effort. Most of the men were American GIs who had been captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge, Hitler's last-gasp counteroffensive that took the advancing American forces by surprise.
⁵⁸
Most were selected because they had Jewish-sounding names, admitted to being Jews, or looked Jewish. None had the slightest notion that they were now enmeshed in the Nazi plan to exterminate the Jews, even as they were herded into cattle cars. Cohen relates their experiences, recalled by the small proportion of men who managed to survive the circumstances of their capture, their treatment as slave laborers, and the final death march away from Berga as advancing American troops closed in on the region. He parallels their experience with that of a Hungarian Jew named Mordecai Hauer, who had also been sent to Berga after he and his family, along with more than 500,000 largely unsuspecting Jewish citizens of Hungary, had been efficiently rounded up by the Germans during the last phase of the war.

There are a number of recurrent themes in the narrative. With some exceptions, the German soldiers generally showed a clear hatred and contempt for the prisoners. Any hint of insolence or disobedience was met with instant, violent retaliation and further contempt. Humor and
schadenfreude
—and sheer sadistic cruelty—were also common in the camp. The guards' responses to disobedience
from the prisoner were often to beat or execute one or more of them. The dead were usually suspended from make-shift gallows as an example to the others, with the guards taunting the dead with mocking humor.
⁵⁹
One survivor, Private William Shapiro, struggling to comprehend the human depravity all around him, recalled a time when a number of prisoners had suffered this fate. In Cohen's words:

Shapiro would cast a furtive glance at the gallows, anxious not to draw the attention of the SS troopers whose cruelty was often on display. Growing up in the Bronx, he had been shown photographs of a lynching in the South and had wondered at the smiling faces of the white murderers. He had never seen a hanging.
⁶⁰

It is one thing to witness a lynching and to ponder its meaning, but when it is accompanied by smiling faces,
⁶¹
it creates disorientation:

Shapiro was at a loss. He had plunged into some netherworld where hangings were public and terrified adolescents with yellow triangles on their sleeves were made to stand at attention in the frigid air before being beaten with batons and rifle butts, but he could not say what this hell was, how it had been constituted, why it existed.
⁶²

The experiences of Hauer, the Hungarian Jew, hint more directly at how envy may have sometimes played a role in the vicious treatment of the Jews and echoes many of the ways Germans had also treated Jews from Germany and other countries. The Hungarian Jews thought they were protected from the Nazis by an agreement made between the German and Hungarian governments. As the war appeared to be coming to an end, most Jews did not fear that this agreement would change. Eichmann himself showed up in the early stages of the roundup to give a speech laced with lies that would induce the Jews to be compliant, telling them that they were being taken to camps for their own protection. However, as the situation deteriorated, the more sober members of the community voiced “dire forecasts.” Hauer intuited that many Hungarians resented and envied the Jews because of their successes. He observed that many Hungarians:

[H]ated the Jews, hated them for saving money, for not drinking, for educating their children, for moving up in the world. Now, with the Nazis in
Hungary, every frustration could be vented; all that the Jews had patiently amassed would be taken.
⁶³

Similar to what occurred in Germany and other countries, one preoccupation of the round-ups involved inspecting possessions,
⁶⁴
notably any valuable items. Hauer recalled his father saying that one Hungarian official claimed that the Jews had “large amounts of gold and diamonds,” and he wanted them for himself because “the Jews are leeches that suck the blood of other people.”
⁶⁵
Cohen notes that Hauer felt “no amount of gold would have satisfied this bigot from Budapest with his conviction that Jews had plundered the wealth of Hungary.”
⁶⁶
It is hard to escape the view that many Hungarians, like many Germans, envied the Jews and that the disappearance of the Jews led to the benefit and satisfaction of many. Envy, camouflaged by rationalized indignation and resentment, would help explain why the Hungarians could do the things that they did to the Jews or stand aside while the Nazis pursued their murderous goals. Hauer never heard anyone say they envied the Jews, but it seemed in the air, no matter how made over or masked.
⁶⁷

One of the puzzles raised by Cohen's account is why the SS guards continued to push the prisoners to their deaths and, further still, march them away from the advancing American lines when it was clear that doing so was foolish. It made their behavior more incriminating in the probable event of their capture by the Allied forces.
⁶⁸
I have emphasized earlier that a key point is that envy changes the nature of what one is “interested in.” Envy inspires a hatred in which the most important goal is to bring the envied person down, even if it is costly to the self in other ways. Arguably, because of a mix of factors—envy being one—the Jews were hated in this way. Here is Hauer's recollection of what a newly arrived SS commander said to the prisoners who were assembled for their march away from the Berga camp:

The enemy is nearing this town … but you won't be left here. The war is not over yet. The Fuhrer has promised us victory, and I believe him. He has a secret weapon, more terrible than our enemies have ever known. This weapon will turn the tide in our favor! But even if we should lose, there is nothing in it for you. You should know that I volunteered to serve in the SS because I hate
you dirty Jews. We have enough machine guns and ammunition to execute a group ten times larger than you are.
⁶⁹

When the war was over and Hauer made the disheartening trip back to his hometown in Hungary to search for survivors and evidence of prior life preserved, he came to discover how much had been taken away. He went by the house owned by a Dr. Grossman. It was one of the nicer homes in Goncz, but Dr. Grossman, of course, no longer lived there, nor did any of his family. They had all likely perished. In a cruel twist, the man who opened the door was someone named Veres, a man reviled by Hauer and his family. He had been an especially open anti-Semite and was proud of it. But now, Veres was full of good cheer and claimed to be only watching over the house until Grossman's return. He also claimed to have tried to help Hauer's family when the Nazis overran the town. Hauer was invited to eat with him and his wife to celebrate his surprise return home, but Hauer left in disgust.

A few years later, Hauer ended up in the United States, where he would carve out a good life for himself as a family man and as a teacher. But the Auschwitz tattoo—A9092—would be forever on his arm. To a degree, he was able to step back from the horrors he experienced and become almost accepting. He could see, for example, the capacity for
schadenfreude
in everyone,
even himself
. Cohen powerfully captures Hauer's thoughts in this way:

The dog was in every man, a beast that could be unleashed. That, at least, was Hauer's conclusion. Man was a divided being. In the right circumstances, with enough encouragement, the dogs would rampage. He recalled how in the camps, on a bright day, he might sit in the sun and feel happy for a moment as he crushed the lice that crawled all over him. Killing them was some measure of revenge on a living thing actually weaker than him. The pleasure was ephemeral. But in everyone there lurked some potential to find contentment in another's pain. In Germany, all constraint had been cast off, the beasts had run wild.
⁷⁰

Hauer also found comfort, perhaps a little
schadenfreude
, in realizing that Germans would have to live with the knowledge of what they had done. This would be a heavy burden, and it was comforting to make such a downward
comparison. And Hauer was lucky, at least in the sense that he survived. He, like the few lucky Americans soldiers who also survived, picked up the pieces and had successful lives. GI William Shapiro returned home, earned a medical degree, and had a long career as an obstetrician. His sentence in the hell of the Holocaust perpetrated by the Nazis ended when, during the forced marched away from Berga, he and other fellow soldiers were resting in a barn and heard the close advance of American troops. Shapiro, emaciated and weakened, staggered out of the barn to see a white star imprinted on a Sherman tank approaching his way. The SS guards had scattered. An American jeep drove up, and Shapiro heard the friendly words spoken by an American soldier, words that were in such contrast to the barking commands he had heard from the guards: “Climb in, soldier.” And with those three words, a better world welcomed him.
⁷¹

No one who actually knew the president ever quite understood Chevy Chase's
Saturday Night Live
impersonation of him as a genial dolt who stumbled over doorsteps. … Even the slightest misstep was taken as more proof that this graceful and athletic man, who had played on two national championship football teams at the University of Michigan and turned down offers from the pros, was, in fact, a bumbler.

—J
AMES
A. B
AKER
III
¹

“He that is without sin among you, let him cast a stone at her.” And again he stooped down, and wrote on the ground. And they which heard it, being convicted by their own conscience, went out one by one, beginning at the eldest, even unto the last: And Jesus was left alone, and the woman standing in the midst.

—J
OHN
8:3–11
²

I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parceled out unequally at birth.

—N
ICK
C
ARRAWAY
,
T
HE
G
REAT
G
ATSBY
³

One of my first bosses left a lasting impression on me. I helped him manage a group of high school student employees at the movie theater I mentioned in
Chapter 5
. Much of these kids' banter was at each other's expense. Mistakes
inspired ribbing, sometimes ridicule. This was mostly how they entertained themselves between shows and after the concession rush. But they did not behave this way around my boss. When he emerged from the manager's office to make his rounds, gather the cash, check the Coke syrup, examine the ice chests, they would rein it in. It was not because they feared him. They respected him, as did I.

The source of our respect was something indistinct at first. It was not his physical presence. He was slight of build and had a pallor that caused him to blend into the surroundings. But he made wise decisions under pressure. Movie theaters usually run smoothly, but they are also only one broken projector away from a frustrated public wanting its money back. And sometimes boorish customers cause problems. To paraphrase Rudyard Kipling, my boss kept his head when everyone about him was losing theirs, even accepting blame for problems if this resolved the issue nicely.
⁴
But what really set him apart—and produced a kind of awe in me—was that I never once saw him either criticize or make fun of another person. He liked listening to jokes and saw the humor in people's behavior, but he left criticism to others and recoiled from unkind laughter.