The Longest Echo

by Eoin Dempsey

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. These men didn’t shoot my family because of some gruesome bloodlust. If so, why didn’t they continue their murderous ways after the war ended? Why were they able to rejoin society and live as peaceful citizens in Germany and Austria and Italy and Croatia and Argentina and a host of other places all over the world? It’s easy, convenient even, to paint these men as evil. To write them off as monsters and to think we’re inherently better than them. 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.”