[My father had no illusions about his own fallibility, and he was too intelligent to think he was innately superior to America’s war-time enemies. As he notes here, only the circumstance of his birth in the United States may have separated him from the Germans engaged in the terrible malevolence of the Holocaust. Knowing this, my father also understood the burden of responsibility he carried to promote the compassionate and inclusive philosophy into which he had been born and raised.]
May 6, 1945 (Ft. Jackson, S.C.)
Last week TIME printed pictures and reports from several of the German concentration camps captured by the Americans. This week there was additional evidence, about Dachau; LIFE printed pages of the horror, – human bodies, broken, burned, beaten, starved, – piles of bodies so vast and horrible that the sense of individual tragedy is blurred, and the mind fails to comprehend the meaning, if there is any meaning, to such utter bestiality. Then this afternoon it came over me, while I saw these scenes repeated on the theatre screen, how slender a thread of chance had prevented me from being one of those beasts, or one of those victims. We are all men, and partake of the same nature, and ultimately know the same capabilities, even of degradation. Had I been born in Germany, and been educated a German, and caught up in the Nazi madness at the age of eleven or twelve, I could have been one of those German boys who burned the despised swine in the warehouse, and machine-gunned those few who broke loose and fled. I know there is cruelty in me, and more than once I have exulted in it. But what is important is that I’ve had the chance to learn a way of life which can keep in check the brute in me, if never wholly eradicate it. Very well I know that it isn’t the only way of life, or a perfect way of life. But by its principles men are, at least, strongly influenced to live peaceably together, to respect the rights which all men share alike in a common humanity. This morning I finished the philosopher Spinoza’s pure exposition of those principles, and knew that they were in harmony with the ideas of man and society which I have learned to love. If I falter now in my fight to keep those ideas living among men, after I’ve seen so clearly what men can become when these ideas die in them, or are never born, the fault will lie with no one but me.
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