A moral dilemma I hope no American has to face

My first husband, Dr. Joseph Stanley Rabianski, was born in Chicago to Polish Catholic parents.  We lived in Georgia, and I taught at Georgia State University, and what was then, in the mid-1970s, Clayton Community College. 

At the community college, after I taught a piece of literature with the theme of man’s inhumanity to man, one of my students came up after class and confided that he was adopted by his parents, both survivors of a concentration camp, and that his mother had been sterilized by the Nazis.  I listened attentively as he told me that his mother told him over and over that the German people were not their enemies, just the Nazis. 

She often told her son stories. One was that she and her husband, prior to their marriage, were confined to the women’s and men’s side of the same concentration camp.  Their German guards had been conscripted and pledged loyalty to the Nazis.  However, she knew their real feelings because they were kind whenever it was safe to be kind.  The lives of their guards, but not their hearts and minds, belonged to the Nazis.

One story that she told him many times was that a friendly guard in the men’s camp would occasionally send his father to the women’s camp with a message for his friend, the women’s guard.  The guards sometimes saved little scraps like potato skins that they gave his father to take, along with the message to the woman’s guard, who saw that his girlfriend received them as his gift.  Sometimes he would catch a glimpse of her, too, while he was there.

I have remembered this story for 50 years, and realized it was time to share it when my family recently watched the 1999 Academy award-winning documentary “The Last Days” at the Alliance’s Dwares Jewish Community Center, in Providence, on April 7. 

One of the survivors in the documentary, Renee Firestone, railed over how her Hungarian friends and neighbors stood on the side of the road and watched –  with some even jeering – as the local Jews were marched out of town to the freight trains waiting to take them to the death camps.

As an elderly woman recalling her memories of that march, Firestone was still clearly aghast that people she had felt were friends had not resisted the Nazis. 

A discussion after the movie with Rabbi Michael Cahana, son of survivor Alice Lok Cahana, prompted comments and questions about whether people would resist if a totalitarian government affected us in the United States.  Would we all stand up and fight – or not? 

In the documentary, one survivor, Tom Lantos, who at the time of the filming of the documentary was a U.S. representative from California, recalled that he and two of his friends had pledged to stand by each other after capture.  However, when a Nazi guard decided to shoot one of them, and the two others stood in front of the boy to protect him, the guard said that they should step aside, or he would shoot them, too. 

At that moment of moral decision, they both stood aside.  Lantos went on to say that deciding whether to keep their pledge was a decision made in haste, but when it came to saving their own lives, they stood aside and let their Jewish friend be shot. 

When I told this story to my husband in the 1970s, he said that his Polish uncles and other resisters had been marched by the Nazis into a frozen pond and made to stand there until they froze to death.  I asked why they did not just shoot them.  He responded that his relatives felt that the Nazis liked to kill in atrocious ways to make resisters suffer as a warning to others.  My husband also suspected it was a way to save ammunition as the war dragged on and a few stubborn Catholic Poles, like his relatives, continued to resist. 

These two long-ago stories have always caused me to wonder:  Were all Germans evil?  Probably not, but like survivor Tom Lantos, who allowed his young Jewish friend to be shot by the Nazi soldier, the question is whether or not we are willing to sacrifice ourselves and endanger our families to do what is right and just. 

I hope that moral dilemma never comes to us in the United States.

NANCY (MUNZERT) CARRIUOLO, Ph.D., was the president of Rhode Island College from 2008-2016. Now retired, she lives in Riverside.