‘What is that?’ Elizabeth was asking in her dissertation. What is the form of life, the shape of the soul, of a human being? Here were pictures of humans: well-fed SS girls, hair nicely set; starved men and women lifted into trucks; children playing beside trenches filled with naked bodies; skeletal blank-faced survivors who looked like corpses. The ‘Belsen cruelties were inflicted by people who saw what they did’, observed Mary Glover; but there ‘is little ground for self-congratulation if we prefer the cruelties we cannot see’. Nagasaki has shown us ‘that there is no degree of cruelty from
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