Once We Were Brothers

“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.

“They were demons in the literal sense, Miss Lockhart. Humans are incapable of planning and propagating mass genocide unless prompted by external evil. There is inherent goodness in the soul of man. God put in there. These Nazis were the minions of the devil, recruited among the weak and those inclined to evil.”

In addition to explaining Ben’s theological basis for remaining faithful to God even after the Holocaust, this quote reveals the extent to which Ben’s faith in humanity is also intact, despite the atrocities men committed against him and his family.

“But as it was, our destiny was uncertain, and abandoning one’s roots without anywhere to go is a leap into the abyss. As I mentioned to you at the restaurant, no rational person could have conceived of the unbounded evil, of the genocide and the slaughter.” 

Ben once again addresses the tendency to question the decision-making of Jews who stayed in Europe until it was too late. While modern observers may believe it was irrational to stay, the alternative—“a leap into the abyss”—may have seemed equally irrational to those families at the time.

“What a difference there was in his expression once he walked into the house. Gone was the smirk of the arrogant Nazi. It was like he felt he didn’t belong anymore, but this was his family, all eight of us, and he hung his head.” 

This quote speaks to the extent to which a sense of belonging matters to Otto. It also helps explain how the sense of belonging he felt with the Nazis led him to betray his surrogate family.

“Many people lump them together, but the Nazis had two different types of camps. Concentration camps were essentially prison camps. Some, like Dachau and Mauthausen, existed in Germany and Austria before the war. People were initially sentenced there by courts to serve out their terms, although the conditions were so terrible—malnutrition, disease, brutality, random executions—that most did not survive. While in the concentration camps, prisoners did slave labor for the Reich. During the war, new concentration camps were constructed, like Bergen-Belsen and Theresienstadt. Death camps, or extermination camps, like Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, called the Operation Reinhard camps, were built for the sole purpose of killing as many people as quickly as possible. When the Nazis decreed in 1941 that mass murder, not expulsion, was the solution to the Jewish problem, they began to build death camps.” 

The distinction between concentration camps and death camps is important to consider when thinking about the nature of detention facilities, both throughout history and today. There is a tendency among modern commentators to dismiss comparisons of modern migrant detention facilities to concentration camps simply because they don’t resemble the Nazis’ extermination camps, for which there is little to no historical or modern analogue.

“Incomprehensible because we’re Americans? Land of the free and home of the brave? Let’s not kid ourselves. We’ve authored our own chapters in the history of shame, periods where the world looked at us and shook its head. Early America built an economy based on slavery and it was firmly supported by the law. Read the Supreme Court’s decision in Dred Scott. We trampled entire cultures of Native Americans. ‘No Irish Need Apply’ was written on factory gates in nineteenth century New York.” 

Ben reminds Catherine that the difference between the Holocaust and other ethnic-based atrocities that took place on American soil is merely velocity. The connective tissue between Nazi genocide and American slavery, or the decimation of indigenous people, is the scourge of mass dehumanization, which he warns can take hold at any time.

“Find a reason to turn your nose up at a culture, to denigrate a people because they’re different, and it’s not such a great leap from ethnic subjugation to ethnic slaughter.” 

Ben argues that the Holocaust should not seem so inconceivable to modern observers as long as there are still places where racism or anti-immigrant prejudice is alive and well.

“If you want proof of God, Catherine, go to the mountains.” 

While Ben offers a number of theological reasons for why God exists, it is this pastoral observation that is especially direct and evocative.

“That’s a question I’ve pondered all my life, as has every person affected by incomprehensible tragedy. My answer is this: He was there, Catherine, weeping.” 

While many Jews chose to reject God after the Holocaust, Ben possesses a more deist take on the matter. To him, God blessed man with free will, and so it would be contradictory to intervene when men choose to follow Satan’s will instead of his own.

“The abuse is saving her life. She’s alive because officers desire her.” 

This is another example of Otto’s increasingly inhumane tendency to justify Nazi atrocities. As his surrogate sister Beka ostensibly suffers rape and other forms of sexual abuse, he stands idly by; in his mind, abuse is preferable to death. Beka’s eventual suicide suggests otherwise.

“No, Catherine, the purpose was always elimination. Heydrich declared that the Jewish ghettos were to be located as close as possible to rail connections. Heydrich saw this as a temporary situation, until the Jews could be moved to extermination camps, because his stated goal was the elimination of all European Jews.” 

This quote offers important historical context as to how the Final Solution played out. As the chief architect of the Jewish extermination, Reinhard Heydrich framed the construction of ghettos as a step toward using Jews as free labor in the German war effort. This is how he convinced influential German industrialists that the ghettos were a necessity. As Ben notes, however, Heydrich always intended the ghettos to be a temporary transition point before mass extermination.

“There are many reasons to study and teach about the Holocaust, and maybe the most important reason is to prevent reoccurrences. We are sentries, Catherine. We stand on the wall, on guard against any hint that the minions of genocide are reassembling. As the 1945 Nuremberg trials would establish, crimes against humanity must never again go unpunished. That is why Otto must be exposed and publicly prosecuted. We must never allow the world to forget.” 

This quote speaks to Ben’s motivations in bringing Elliot to justice. Rather embracing his mission as one of revenge, Ben believes that bringing war criminals to justice is the best way to prevent future atrocities. Taken in context of the rest of the narrative, this neatly encapsulates the difference between vengeance and justice.

“This is one Jewish girl you won’t violate.” 

Faced with a seemingly binary decision between rape and murder, Beka rejects this and chooses instead to commit suicide. It’s an extraordinarily grim depiction of the choices facing Jews caught in the Nazis’ path.

“Mr. Jenkins, I’m ashamed of you. For what? For justice, that’s what! I’m not abandoning this case. I’ll work the file out of my house if I have to. Fire me, if you want to. For now, I’m on leave.” 

This marks a major turning point for Catherine, who up til now has doubted whether she’s willing to jeopardize her career for Ben’s case. It also shows that while Catherine is often full of doubt when in conflict with herself, she is far more assertive in external confrontations.

“You’ll be a brilliant statesman, like your father. Or maybe just a cranky old farmer, feeding hay to buttermilk.” 

There is a tragic quality to these words from Hannah to Ben. As the reader knows, Ben becomes neither a statesman nor a farmer, but a starter on the city’s public golf courses. While Ben finds dignity in that position, it is a far cry from the life of possibilities he possessed before the Nazis invaded Poland.

“I can’t abide by those principles. I have a law license—a privilege to make a damn good living practicing a public profession. And it’s a service profession, Mr. Jenkins. It’s not just about the money and your books of business and how many institutional clients you can collect. It’s about using that license to further justice.” 

This is among the most direct and elegant expressions of the theme of careerism versus justice. In Catherine’s telling, many lawyers possess lucrative and respectable careers in law without serving justice in any way, shape, or form. This is analogous to Otto’s tendency to rationalize his evil by arguing it’s all for the sake of his Nazi career.

“But as feral as their existence was, they were a lot better off than on the cattle cars to Belzec. What courage and determination those forest dwellers had.” 

Ben provides a fascinating but regrettably brief glimpse at a group of “forest-dwellers” who scrape by in the wilderness as survivalists to avoid the Nazis. According to the Holocaust Museum, there were as many as 1,236 of these so-called “Bielski partisans” who survived in the forests of Nazi-occupied Poland.

“I said, ‘What happened to the box of jewelry?’ His answer, if you recall, was, ‘Wouldn’t you like to know.’”

Until this moment, it is still possible to doubt that Elliot is Otto. Despite the mounting evidence in support of Ben’s accusations, the revelation that Elliot is Otto beyond a shadow of a doubt is chilling.

“You know, as we sat there, I kept wanting to ask him questions, to make some sense of the unfathomable, maybe to satisfy a macabre curiosity. Like those who interview serial killers—what made you do it, how can you live with yourself? I wanted to know how he could sleep at night with the wails of thousands of innocents screaming in his head. But I already knew his answer.” 

Ben gives voice to a common humanistic urge to understand why men do evil. It reflects a virtually limitless capacity for empathy on the part of humanity, even toward serial killers and Nazis. But having looked into the face of evil more times than anyone ever should, Ben knows there is no understanding it beyond this: the utter contempt people like Otto feel toward their fellow man.

“Compared to Ben, I’m nothing. What have I ever done? What have I accomplished in my life? I’ve represented insurance companies and big corporations in cases that have no social significance. What kind of a lawyer have I been? Were I to die tomorrow, Liam, what footprints have I left on the Earth?” 

Catherine speaks to the profound difficulty of reforming one’s career in the name of justice. While her decision to sever ties with Jenkins & Fairchild is commendable, she worries that her years of working on behalf of giant corporations has left her ill-equipped to tackle more virtuous legal challenges like Ben’s case.

“Gone was the arrogant swagger. What remained was just a frightened, defenseless old man looking plaintively into the faces of his keepers, begging for mercy. What a turnabout.” 

During his arrest and perp walk, Elliot remains arrogant and defiant. What breaks him is the knowledge that his high-priced lawyers abandoned him. Both as Otto and as Elliot, the man took comfort in belonging to the in-crowd, whether the Nazi party or America’s wealthy 1 percent. Now he knows he is out for good, alone with his sins.

“God doesn’t ask you to be Ruth or Sarah. He only asks you to be Catherine.” 

In the Old Testament both Ruth and Sarah are known for their extraordinary kindness and hospitality. They are often considered paragons of female goodness in the Jewish tradition. Ben’s point is that Catherine must let go of her self-doubts because she is good in deed and in heart, which is more than enough.