Death Takes a Holiday

The New York Times has a remarkable story this week about a photo album that came out of Auschwitz, with an accompanying slideshow that’s incredibly arresting. You see, rather than the usual deeply upsetting images of skeletonesque inmates suffering untold miseries, they’re pictures of their captors and executioners at rest and play, frolicking, hanging out, mugging for the camera, generally behaving like any people taking a break from the rigors of a job well done would. Except that the same day the pictures were taken, these well-rested and attractive people committed incredibly depraved acts against other humans. In these images, even Dr. Joseph Mengele seems like a shrimpy nebbish, with barely a hint of the maggots roiling behind his smiling eyes.

There’s one woman in the pictures, who appears a few times. She’s clearly a camp administrator of some kind, and she’s young, fresh, and pretty. She’s clearly vivacious and strong-willed; it’s easy to be attracted to this face from more than sixty years ago and imagine a friendship or a friendly beer. And then I realize that behind that smile and those pretty eyes is a mind completely and totally at ease with sorting families into keepers and corpses every single day, and I want to puke myself dry.

Thank the deity of your choice that such an artifact exists, and is in the hands of the National Holocaust Museum. For the danger, as we all know intellectually but tend to forget in our guts, is not from overt acts of monstrousness, but in the workaday—yes—banality of evil.