The Longest Echo

by Eoin Dempsey

“Don’t let what you’ve seen here change who you are, my love. Don’t let the evil that the SS scum have inflicted imprison you. You will survive this—I’ll make sure of that. And when you do, you must live the most wondrous life, beyond any of our simple imaginations. Don’t let their hatred live. Leave it behind, and you will have won.”

History is not past, but merely an extension of the present, to which all people are tied.

How are human beings able to devalue the pain of others so frivolously? What is this “civilization” that we’re striving for? Do we have it in us to be civilized, or are we nothing more than animals, responding to the most potent stimulus?

was ironic that the Nazis’ worst enemies, the communists, had saved many of them from paying for their war crimes.

“Don’t let what you’ve seen here change who you are, my love. Don’t let the evil that the SS scum have inflicted imprison you. You will survive this—I’ll make sure of that. And when you do, you must live the most wondrous life, beyond any of our simple imaginations. Don’t let their hatred live. Leave it behind, and you will have won.”

Could this happen again?” She paused to make eye contact with several people in the crowd. “The answer is yes. The men who committed these terrible crimes, many of whom still walk among civilized society today, weren’t anything special. They weren’t picked from prisons or plucked from padded rooms. They weren’t hardened criminals or diagnosed psychopaths, just ordinary people. They came from all walks of life. Many of them were educated and intelligent. Many were not. Who knows how many among you sitting here tonight might have done the same thing in their places?”

“The simple truth is that it takes unimaginable strength to be different. To break away from what your peers are doing is one of the hardest things for anyone, be that person a child in the schoolyard or a twenty-one-year-old SS man trying to gain the trust of his fellow soldiers.

It’s harder to realize that there’s a little bit of that same monster in all of us, and the only real way to stop that monster is to make sure that those with the ideas to destroy that which is good and true don’t attain power. Because once they do, and people start to believe their lies, and stop thinking of their fellow human beings as that—as human beings—then they are capable of anything, even the reprehensible evils that I witnessed with my own eyes just fourteen years ago in a country known for some of the greatest art and discoveries that civilization has ever known.”