The Longest Echo

by Eoin Dempsey

“How are you? Don’t you guys ever go home to your families?” “I might if I had one.”

Same

Why us? Why anyone? We’ve seen film of Nazis on trial, proclaiming that they had no choice in what they did, that they were merely ‘following orders,’ as if, somehow, we’ll nod and agree and understand their actions. We presume that their punishment would have been so great as to negate any of their moral objections to the unthinkable atrocities they carried out, but what was the alternative? Death to all who refused? “There’s one major problem with this explanation—that in the hundreds of cases my husband and I have read, of the grisliest crimes ever recorded, not one defense attorney in any Nazi trial was ever able to document a single case in which refusal to kill unarmed civilians resulted in the ‘inevitable’ gruesome punishment. Not once. In hundreds of cases.”

“There were some men who did refuse to murder innocents. Their punishment never approached the hideous acts the men who didn’t refuse perpetrated. The men who refused orders were castigated, moved on, given slop duty, or, at worst, and this was on rare occasion, put into punishment units. They were never lined up, in a cemetery, huddled together, terrified, as my sisters, my mother, my aunt, my cousins, and my neighbors were. They were never murdered in cold blood, as my family were.”

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.”