Am I a Murderer?

An incident from the early fifties, when I was an undergraduate at the University of Michigan: Sitting in the lounge chairs of the Newman Club, a group of us discussed at length and with all seriousness whether it was a sin to stop at a red light in a very small town at 3 A.M., and then, with no other car in sight to drive on before the signal turned green. Later, in combat in Korea, I recall asking a chaplain about moral problems involved in killing--and also of the possibility of being killed while at the height of one's rage over seeing a friend killed right beside you. The chaplain waved me away: "Don't worry about it!"

I felt then, and still feel, that my questions were real and significant. But today I weigh such matters in a different context. After studying and reflecting on the Holocaust for more than thirty years, I continue to learn about the vastly more difficult moral dilemmas faced by victims of the persecution, dilemmas to which they had to respond immediately and decisively. The most recent revelation came through the posthumous publication, under the title Am I a Murderer?, of a document that had lain undiscovered for half-a-century, the personal history of a Jew named Calel Perechodnik who became a ghetto policeman in Poland and collaborated with the Nazis in the hope that he could thereby save his own life and those of his wife and daughter.

He betrayed Jews to save his family; but the betrayer was betrayed. Frank Fox, who translated the diary, tells the essence of the story in a Foreword: "Perechodnik and other policemen [help] eight thousand Otwock Jews into the town square, where they are loaded into boxcars. The policemen are promised immunity for their own wives and children, but the German enemy deceives them. Perechodnik watches in horror as his wife and daughter are loaded into wagons headed for the Treblinka death camp."

Just before his own death during the war, probably by his own hand, Calel Perechodnik gave the document to a friend; it finally came into the hands of Fox, who prepared it for publication. Perechodnik begins by saying that, though he is not a man of faith, this memoir is his deathbed confession. Telling the story, he blames himself completely, never offering any mitigating circumstances. Pain fills every word of the record. Perechodnick tells us that one day, after his family was shipped out, "I saw in the Polish neighborhood a girl pushing perhaps a two-year-old child in a carriage. My legs buckled under me. I recognized my daughter's stroller." He writes of his urge to strangle this baby who lived while his own did not.

The book encompasses a detailed account of ghetto life under the Nazis, a time of misery and desperation relieved only slightly by rare acts of kindness toward the Jews; but its focus and significance lie in its pitiless self-examination. The writing at first seems cold, detached, fully objective, but Perechodnik's crimes batter his spirit and he cannot remain emotionless. About a third of the way through he refers to the "fairy tale" believed by some, that "the heart is a chamber of delicate membranes that cannot stand suffering or emotion, and that they burst, causing death." Not so: "Today I would advise those who construct fighter planes to build them out of heart membranes. They will certainly not burst and will outlast the most enduring steel." Later he writes that he always wanted a child, to remember him after his death. But he helped destroy that child. We read, "These diaries are that fetus...."

Dare we throw stones at this man? Should he have tried to save his family at the expense of others? Are we in any position to judge?

These are questions that occur often to students of the Shoah. I know a Holocaust survivor who, as a girl in hiding with others, watched her father smother her infant brother, whose cries would have betrayed the presence of all those in concealment. Did he have the moral right to do that?

Adam Czerniakow, the head of the Warsaw Judentrat (the Nazi-appointed ghetto administration), was condemned by some Jews for collaborating, praised by other Jews for doing his best to ease the burden of victims under previously unimaginable conditions. Among his tasks was to help decide who went on the next trains to Auschwitz. The general practice was to try to protect the rabbis, the intelligentsia, and the children, who would form a core for regenerating Judaism. When Czerniakow got the order to begin sending children, he killed himself. Was that response wholly unacceptable?

And what of the Pole in exile, Shmuel Zygelbojm, who appealed repeatedly but in vain to the unbelieving Allies to act on the atrocity reports emanating from the ghettos. In a last effort to get attention, he punctuated his final letter condemning the lethargy by his own suicide. "May my death be a resounding cry of protest, against the indifference...." Was Zygelbojm's death a violation of God's law?

There is a story, well known to those working in Holocaust studies, of a woman in a death camp who was the only prisoner with access to the entire camp, because her assignment was to collect the corpses of those who had collapsed and died from hunger, despair, illness, and carry them by wheelbarrow to a place of disposal. One day a new prisoner in the early stages of pregnancy was brought to the camp. The other prisoners, eager to protect new life in the midst of death, rallied to her support, sharing their meager rations with her, hiding her in the midst of roll calls, helping her in her work. When her time came, the wheelbarrow woman placed her under some corpses, took her to a remote part of the camp, and helped her to bear the child. The wheelbarrow woman then strangled the baby to save its mother's life; it was standard Nazi practice to liquidate new mothers immediately, since they were considered to be poor workers. After the war the wheelbarrow woman said she would dedicate her life to having children. What is to be said of her act? And what of the women doctors in the camp, including some who opposed abortion in principle, who performed them (gruesomely, without medical aids, sometimes even without water) to save the mothers from Nazi execution?

These are surely serious questions, and there are many, many others. The question I put to the chaplain in Korea now pales in significance; the traffic signal debate of my college days seems ineffably trivial. While camping after hunting, William James and friends watched a dog chase a squirrel around a tree. A problem was raised: It is clear that the dog circles the tree, but does it circle the squirrel, which keeps the tree between himself and the dog? After much discussion, James resolved the issue, at least for himself, by concluding that "It doesn't matter."

How difficult some philosophical questions can be!