This Week’s Selected Media, September 8, 2024: An Iron Wind
This week I finished:
An Iron Wind: Europe Under Hitler, by Peter Fritzsche: This book recounted life during 1939-45, mostly in Paris, Warsaw, and Switzerland. I got it because I’m interested in learning how people and cultures rationalize and justify acting against their values.
The book delivered, though people’s internal psychology wasn’t its main point. Still, it talked about how citizens of occupied countries knew what the Nazis were doing with Jews, but focused on their concerns. They separated themselves.
On the other hand, it didn’t treat to what extent the Nazis planned and successfully made resistance too risky and costly. What would anyone do when any resistance could mean death? You may be partly enraged that, say, Jean-Paul Sartre describes the French as resisting as best they could and therefore respectable, yet saying not one word about Jews, which everyone knew about. Yet, what could they have done? I don’t know. I’m not posing the question rhetorically.
I suspect many more people could have done more to resist and oppose the Nazis. How many of us think we would have done more yet wouldn’t have?
The most chilling image came when he talked about Jews in the Warsaw ghetto writing diaries up until the end. Fritzsche based a lot of the book on personal diaries. The image in question is a diary that ends mid-sentence. It’s a haunting image in two ways. First, the diary writer chose to write until the end. Second, he or she was likely stopped by a Nazi soldier entering and taking the person to a train to take him or her to Auschwitz.
The book is full of insights and history. I’ve barely scratched the surface. The parallels to today, when nearly everyone contributes to nine million people dying from breathing polluted air per year, as opposed to six million Jews over several years, are more clear, seem clear.
To those of us who think people then could have done more, what can you do more today when the death count is higher and the risks of resistance negligible in comparison?
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