Here’s what we don’t want to admit: the Germans who participated in the Holocaust weren’t monsters. They were ordinary people. Teachers, shopkeepers, fathers, neighbors. People like us.
We cling to the idea that they were somehow different. More evil, more susceptible, more broken. Because if they weren’t different, that means we’re capable of the same thing.
And we are.
The Line Runs Through Every Heart
The research is clear. Put ordinary people in the right circumstances and give them authority figures, social pressure, gradual escalation, and most will comply. Stanford proved it. Milgram proved it. History keeps proving it.
But here’s the question that haunts me: why do some people resist?
In occupied Poland, the same circumstances produced very different choices. Some people hid Jews in their attics, risking their entire families. Others turned in their neighbors for a bag of sugar. Some joined the resistance. Others joined the police who hunted resisters.
Same country. Same occupation. Same fear. Different choices.
Two Paths
My mother-in-law Edna saw both paths up close.
She saw her father’s Polish worker steal her mother’s last zloty, then turn them into the Gestapo. She saw neighbors turn in neighbors for extra rations. She saw people who’d seemed decent become complicit, either through active collaboration or silent acceptance. She saw the Nazi psychopath “Frankenstein” hunt Jewish children for sport while ordinary Poles looked the other way.
But she also saw resistance. At age seven, Edna was smuggling food through the Warsaw Ghetto walls. By ten, she’d become the youngest decorated soldier in the Polish Home Army, carrying messages through burning streets in one of the fiercest urban battlefields in history.
She wasn’t special. She was a child. Terrified. Traumatized. Marked for death.
So what made the difference?
The Uncomfortable Truth
The honest answer is: we don’t fully know.
We know that moral courage requires cultivation before crisis. That people who practice small acts of integrity are more likely to resist when stakes get higher. That diverse relationships make it harder to dehumanize others. That studying history helps recognize warning patterns.
But we also know this: most people, in those circumstances, collaborated or stayed silent. The resisters were the exception. The minority. The anomaly.
And here’s what keeps me up at night: most of the people who collaborated probably thought of themselves as good people. They had reasons. Justifications. They were protecting their families. Following orders. Staying safe. Being realistic.
The line between good and evil doesn’t run between nations or religions or political parties. It runs through every human heart. And none of us knows for certain which side we’d fall on until tested.
America’s Convenient Memory
Let’s be clear about something else: America didn’t enter World War II to save the Jews. We entered after Pearl Harbor, to save ourselves. The Holocaust was happening, and we knew, and we did nothing.
Then our soldiers opened the gates at Dachau and Buchenwald. They saw what Edna had survived. The bodies stacked like cordwood. The gas chambers. The skeletal survivors. And they couldn’t unsee it.
One sergeant wrote home: “I thought what I’d heard was propaganda. It wasn’t. If anything, the truth had been held back.”
That’s when Americans decided we were the heroes of this story. The liberators. The good guys who defeated evil. And slowly, anti-Semitism became something un-American.
The Witnesses Are Dying
Edna lived until she was 84. In her 40s and 50s, she told her story, bearing witness to what she’d survived. But she spent the rest of her life learning how to survive the trauma itself. Now she’s gone, along with most of the other survivors and liberators.
And in their place, we’re seeing something familiar. Propaganda. Rhetoric that dehumanizes. The same patterns, dressed up in modern language.
History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. And right now, we’re hearing echoes.
Stop Hate Before It Spreads
Hate spreads like cancer. It starts small. A joke. A stereotype. A casual comment about “those people.” Then it metastasizes.
You stop cancer early. The same is true for hate.
When someone at the dinner table makes a comment about an entire group of people, don’t stay silent. You don’t have to give a speech. Just say: “That’s not fair” or “I don’t see it that way.” Silence is permission.
When you see dehumanizing language online, don’t scroll past. Call it out. Report it. Refuse to let it become normal. The Nazis didn’t start by calling Jews subhuman. They started by calling them vermin, parasites, problems to be solved. Pay attention to the language.
When politicians or public figures scapegoat vulnerable groups, don’t rationalize it as “just politics.” Write. Call. Vote. Make noise. Fascism counts on good people deciding it’s not their problem yet.
Get to know people different from you. It’s hard to dehumanize someone when you know their kids’ names, when you’ve shared a meal, when they’re not an abstraction but a person.
And teach your children. Don’t shield them from this history. They need to know what humans are capable of. And they need to know that ordinary people made choices, every single day, that either enabled evil or resisted it.
I wrote Edna’s memoir because her testimony matters. Not just as history, but as warning. The Nazis didn’t start with gas chambers. They started with words. With ideas about who belonged and who didn’t. With small acts of cruelty that became normal.
The question isn’t whether it could happen again. The question is: when you hear those rhymes, when you see those patterns emerging, which path will you choose?
You won’t know until you’re tested. But you can prepare. The time to build your resistance is now, in small moments, before the crisis comes.
Because the line between good and evil runs through your heart too.
And the choice will be yours.
