Why Do Victims of Massacres Go Quietly to Their Deaths?

I often hear that it’s a moral imperative to learn from the great 20th century atrocities, that these events are a window into what humans are capable of, and we must find those impulses in ourselves to make sure we do not follow in their footsteps. The people saying this always mean studying the perpetrators to understand man's capacity to slaughter innocents.

I’ll add that it’s equally important to contemplate the actions of the victims—and especially their inactions. Most victims were appallingly passive in the face of oncoming death. At the final moment, a man would watch a hundred people in front of him lined up and shot, and then line up to receive his own bullet. We’re told that people are cowards out of a desire to save their own lives, but when passive cowardice was very obviously a certain path to extermination, and the only slim chance at life was through some desperate action, approximately nobody tried anything. This was a shameful abdication of the most basic duty to protect one’s own life and the lives of others. We must find those impulses in ourselves to make sure we do not follow in their footsteps. Man's capacity to follow meekly as he's herded to his obvious death is at least as important to understand as man’s capacity to slaughter innocents.

Once events have reached the point where you’re being lined up in front of a shallow trench filled with the bodies of your neighbors, you obviously don’t have any *good* options. Still, at that point there is nothing *worse* than doing what you’re told for the last ninety seconds of your life and making things easy for the death squad. Better to sprint for the edge of the field and force your murderers to spend a few extra bullets while they chase you down. Better to attack with rocks or fists or fingernails, go down swinging and maybe even injure one of them. Never mind the one-in-a-thousand chance that it somehow helps, that those behind you also run and a few slip away in the chaos, at least it’s better to disrupt the orderly factory lines of the death machine and mildly inconvenience those who operate it.

But we are not here to exhort the dead to be something other than what they were. Our purpose is to learn from what happened and avoid making similar mistakes. Why did the men who watched the death squads shoot their neighbors, shoot their brothers, shoot their daughters, wait obediently for their own turn to be shot? We can imagine the stultifying terror, the habit of obedience, the knowledge that whoever steps out of line will be shot first. We can imagine the hopelessness and dread and inevitability. We can imagine the brute herd instinct to stay in the mass with our head down.

There is room for debate on when it is appropriate to succumb to cowardice to save yourself. But if we introspect on the experience of cowardice, on how it feels and what provokes it, it is clear that cowardice sometimes makes self-preservation harder. Like any emotional reaction, paralyzing fear can be a useful signal in normal cases, but can lead to deranged behavior in unusual or extreme cases.

What attitude would it take to overcome the paralysis of the men waiting quietly at the lip of the trench? What pattern of thought would recognize, if not the perfect moment for action, then at least a moment where action is less doomed than kneeling for the bullet? What type of mind can take the threat seriously enough, can recognize the necessity of taking a gamble that probably won’t work, without being paralyzed with the enormity of the situation?

And if you take such an attitude and bring it earlier, before that final moment when all hope has already been lost, then it can indeed determine whether you survive. Over half of German Jews survived the Holocaust by simply leaving Germany before emigration was forbidden in 1941. Those who stayed behind were not a random sample. Polish Jews fared worse because the Germans arrived as a conquering army, so fleeing took an extraordinary effort and some luck, and only around 10% were still alive at the end.

One account—I don’t remember where I read it. A teenage girl and a resistance member are in love. He offers to smuggle her out of the ghetto. She wants to go, and asks her mother’s permission. Her mother refuses to send her off with this boy—if the Nazis catch them, they’ll certainly be shot. They have a big screaming fight for hours. Her mother refuses to budge. The girl is inconsolable but she won’t outright disobey her mother. Long after the war is over, the interviewer asks the resistance fighter, Did you ever find out what happened to her? And he answers, No, I assume they both died when the ghetto was liquidated.

The Holocaust gets more airtime than other 20th century atrocities, but all of this applies just as well to the Soviet exterminations or the Khmer Rouge exterminations or the Turkish exterminations. After surviving a Soviet gulag, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn famously wrote:

And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? After all, you knew ahead of time that those bluecaps were out at night for no good purpose. And you could be sure ahead of time that you'd be cracking the skull of a cutthroat. Or what about the Black Maria sitting out there on the street with one lonely chauffeur—what if it had been driven off or its tires spiked? The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!

If … if … We didn't love freedom enough.

To some extent this is an unrealistic fantasy imagining a comforting but implausible level of coordination, but there is also a genuine realization that they had done nothing, in the last minute when there was any slim hope of winning a fight. The gulags were not quite extermination camps, and even a political prisoner like Solzhenitsyn had odds of survival better than a coin flip. How many Polish doctors and engineers had similar thoughts while they were being marched into the Katyn Forest? We can only guess. They didn’t leave memoirs.

When should you fight? When should you arm yourself? When should you make friends with a dozen men who think similarly and happen to know how to use weapons? When should you flee across the border into self-imposed exile? What are the signs to track, what are the thresholds to watch for?

I don’t have any general answers. It depends too much on the specifics of the situation. But these are the questions that come to mind when I read the histories. At the very least it’s a more fruitful lens than the tired “How can I pin Hitler’s crimes on my political opponents?” approach which has become so common.