Commentary: Holocaust survivors teach us that we need to build communities filled with people committed to goodness
In the fall of 1989, I was doing research into the ways people justify doing harm to others. Sitting in the lower levels of the Johns Hopkins library, methodically working my way through a pile of readings about cruelty, I opened a book by Philip Hallie. There I found a description of a moment that changed his life:
People are also reading… Hallie’s story caused me to rethink my own research. Maybe I was trying to answer the wrong question. Maybe I should ask instead how people become committed to doing good. Reframing the focus of my research, I began to notice the many ways we attempt to prevent and punish bad behavior instead of nurturing goodness.
For 16 years I’ve been involved in Holocaust education, working with colleagues to bring scholars and survivors onto campus to lead a workshop for teachers of history and literature. Many assume that spending time with survivors and hearing their stories must be unbearably depressing, but I have found that what I remember most vividly are the life-sustaining kindnesses both given and received.
I remember Magda Herzberger, at 90 years old, dancing about the stage for nearly three hours, reading love poems she had written to an adoring audience. What does it take to create more communities like Le Chambon, where parents and grandparents regard all children as “our” children? Where kindness and generosity are not regarded as exceptional but just what everybody does every day? Where people feel no need to “speak truth to power” but speak simply, humbly and honestly to everybody they meet as a matter of course?
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