Once We Were Brothers

“The bigger the lie, the more the people will believe it.” 

Ben says this in response to Catherine’s disbelief that Elliot is an ex-Nazi, attributing the quote to Adolf Hitler. Although Hitler never said that precisely, he wrote in Mein Kampf, “It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.” (Hitler, Adolf. Mein Kampf. Trans. Ralph Manheim. Houghton Mifflin. 1943.)

“Insane? Should I plead insanity? You have no idea what insanity is, young lady. I’ve known insanity and it can happen again; the next rip in the fabric of humanity. And if it does, the minions of evil will crawl through it—the incomprehensible evil—the next Auschwitz or Cambodia or Bosnia or Darfur. This generation’s Himmler, or Pol Pot or Milosevic. The next Aktion Reinhard.” 

Ben recognizes that while the Holocaust was unprecedented in the size and scale of its destruction of human life, it is not an isolated occurrence. In the last 70 years alone, he identifies three other instances of genocide: The Bosnian genocide that killed over 8,000 Muslims, the Sudanese genocide that killed around 300,000 Darfuri, and the Khmer Rouge genocide that killed between 1.5 and 2 million Cambodians. Other 20th-century genocides that go unmentioned include the 1971 Bangladeshi genocide and the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

“Today, we look back at the Nazi scourge and shake our heads in disbelief. How could such a thing happen? Why were the Jews so meek? It’s incomprehensible. Miss Lockhart, don’t ask me, with all your presumptions, to explain why the Viennese Jews didn’t leave their homes, their community, everything they knew and loved, and respond rationally to a world bereft of reason.” 

Knowing in hindsight the unmitigated destruction of human life during the Holocaust, it is confounding to Catherine—and by extension, readers—to hear about Abraham and Joseph’s refusal to leave their homes. Here, Ben explains why these feelings, while understandable, are misguided and unfair to those who could not possibly have known how bad things would get.