The New York Times published a group of photographs from 1944 that were taken in or near Auschwitz, Germany and only recently were received from an elderly man who had held on to them for over a half century. The pictures of ordinary people were officers and workers of a death camp who were in a jolly mood while resting from their labors of processing other people to death.
Hanna Arendt spoke about the “banality of evil” and put her finger on a fact most people do not think or worry about. These are actions which are inimical to decent and innocent lives. Eichmann seemed so ordinary and not the demon he actually was when he was in power over the lives of Jews doomed by the Nazi social policies. Neither were the carousing people IN the camp who rested from their labors as though this was such a “normal” reward from their duties.
Instead of being featured in the first section of the Times there was only a notice. The whole story was saved and featured in the Arts section. I began to think that the banality, the ordinary and bland vacationing people were treated in the same way by the Times. The dying 3rd Reich was not gasping in horror or dread – the death camp officers and workers were not aware of the horror they managed. They were ordinary people doing ordinary things in extraordinary times and did not know it.
Hidden away for so long, the victims and their tormenters are long since gone. The man who found the pictures and sent them to the Holocaust center in Washington did not forget. He had found the pictures in a building he lived in at the end of the war but kept them and finally dispatched them to a place where they should have been to amplify what we know about these “ordinary” people.
This was one of those instances of good luck to find a hoard of photographs which gave personalities to the people engaged in killing other people declared by Hitler to be deserving of deportation first but draining them of their wealth and then killing them in the most efficient German methodology known at that time.
Ordinary people doing ordinary things are the meat and drink of ordinary people with cameras recording their lives in moments frozen at the time of the click of a shutter. The extraordinary times of World War II are forgotten by most people and many of them wonder why there should be excitement over the discovery of this evidence of atrocities – no - of people taking time off from their atrocities.
We should not wonder or try to understand but we should never forget.