Demjanjuk's death leaves questions?

Happy Sunday after St. Patty's Day!

If Ivan "John" Demjanjuk's death leaves any questions, they're about us, not him.

You may recall this retired Cleveland autoworker as the guy accused of being "Ivan the Terrible," who participated in the deaths of 27,900 Jews (according to charges he faced in Germany) at the Sobibor death camp in German-occupied Poland in 1943.

A headline in this week's paper suggests his death, at 91, frail, in a nursing home, only leaves questions unanswered, but any questions about the man himself - whether he was or was not Ivan the Terrible - can't possibly matter much now that he's gone. The important questions are the ones his story raises about us.

I've always been a joiner, a follower, a go-alonger. In my profession, I get to do a lot of those personality type inventories, and the so-called clinical data all support this notion. I've known it much longer than I've known what a Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator was. Those things just lend authority to what I knew in middle school, maybe earlier. We can't all be the general or the chief. Some of us have to be the grunts.

And so, whenever this comes up in conversation, I'm surprised by the reaction I get from friends when I translate this self-knowledge into what I feel are its logical extensions: Were I alive in Germany (or maybe anywhere else in Europe) in the 40's, I'd likely side with the Nazis. Were I a plantation dweller, or even poor white trash in the American South before the Civil War, I would have likely supported slavery.

I suppose the shock of saying such things is purely temporal. Friends who know me to be a human rights defending liberal also know that those episodes in human history sicken me, and are what drive me toward my leftist leanings TODAY. I'm pretty sure there are no absolutes, precisely because these disgusting episodes are the logical end of such extreme belief. But let's face it, my largely white, middle class circle of mates would very likely be in the exact same position with me if we traveled back to those eras.

I believe this not just for the convenience of it, but for reasons of pure self preservation. And to be clear here, I'm NOT saying I would have been RIGHT about any of this, just that it's pretty likely the way things would have worked. Think about the situation in Nazi Germany. Hitler led one of the most incredibly successful marketing campaigns in modern history, convincing even the Catholic Church that his plan was a good one. If you weren't with them, you feared for your life. I'm pretty sure if the Pope was convinced to look the other way, my will would have stood little chance of overcoming the force of Hitler's pull. (Hell, I signed a 6-year hitch in my country's service just cuz I ran out of college money... and then stayed on another 16 years just because it would have required more effort to quit than it did to re-enlist!)

As a nation we sat back and watched the atrocity unfold for almost two decades before we'd had enough of the Nazis. So yeah, I don't think it's a stretch that I may have traded my white, non-Jewish background for safety, and perhaps aided by the pressures of the society all around me, joined the army, which, in Germany from the late 1920s to the mid 1940s meant becoming a Nazi.

Now consider some of Dmjanjuk's circumstances. Compared to what most of us deal with these days, the dude's life was hell from the start. He was born to disabled parents in an impoverished village in Ukraine and spent what were probably his most "comfortable" years in the Soviet Army, where he was injured, captured, and imprisoned by Germans. After being captured, he claims he was forced to work in prison camps where he was a PRISONER. Others have claimed he willingly took some pretty horrible jobs in those camps and even became a volunteer. It doesn't really matter now. He's dead. He then spent the rest of his post-military life in displacement camps before escaping to America in 1952, where he raised a family, lived quietly, and dealt with his past on his own.

So put yourself in his shoes. Prison camp, after a horrible life by most standards, and you probably think it's all going to end tomorrow, or the first opportunity you have to piss off your captors. One day they say, "hey, if you stand here and operate this lever, you'll live." Would you operate that lever? What if you didn't really know, at least at first, what that lever did? Don't be so quick to play the hero here with 70 years of safe, comfortable hindsight between you and that prison camp. That's all I'm saying.

If all it takes for evil to prevail is for good people to do nothing, then every one of us is just as guilty as the real Ivan the Terrible. I suspect that if there truly remain any questions regarding John Demjanjuk's history, they are more about us than about him. He's dead. He lived the last 2/3 of his 91 years with the knowledge of choices he made. He was either a psychopath, or he suffered as a result of that knowledge. None of us are completely innocent. And the real question is, would any of us have done anything different in his circumstances... IF he did any of the things he was accused of doing.

So, you think you'd have made better choices? Think you're the true owner of every decision you've ever made? Think you don't just march in lockstep with the pressures of the crowd? Sure you don't. Off to church with you now.

Luth
Out