Psychologists have a term for it. Collective inattention. Imagine a group of, say, coworkers, chatting in a circle. One of the coworkers has a piece of broccoli in between his teeth. Everybody notices but nobody says anything. This is collective inattention. Or when a class is sitting in a classroom with one of the lights out. They all know it is dim. But nobody moves to turn on the light. Again, collective inattention: an unspoken decision to do nothing to correct a problem.
Nobel Prize recipient, author, and Holocaust survivor, Elie Weisel did not use this term in a speech he delivered in Washington, D.C. in 1999, but he might as well have. The author of the acclaimed 1960 memoir about his time in Auschwitz and Buchenwald, Night, recounts the rage the American GIs expressed when they liberated the camps – how he could not understand their language, but how he was grateful for their righteous anger. They bore witness to one of the biggest crimes against humanity in modern times, standing there in a hellscape, littered with, as Weisel puts it, “Muselmanners” or those prisoners who were on the ground “wrapped in their torn blankets...staring blankly into space.” These broken individuals, he continues, “no longer felt pain, hunger, thirst. They feared nothing. They felt nothing. They were dead and did not know it.”
It is likely that these scenes haunted the American soldiers for the rest of their lives. Indeed, like the rest of us, they likely asked themselves over and over again how something like the Holocaust could have occurred at all. What would they say if they found out that major world leaders at the time actually knew what was happening in the camps? Indeed, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, among others, was aware of what Hitler’s Nazi machine was perpetuating. The final solution. The beloved Commander-in-Chief was informed.
Wiesel notes that this sad fact has understandably sullied FDR’s reputation among the Jews. To be sure, the fact that the St. Louis, a ship containing a thousand Jewish refugees, fleeing from Hitler’s Europe, was turned away from an American port in the run-up to the war and that some American companies continued to do business with Germany up until 1942 should be cause to revisit established narratives from that time in history. The Wehrmacht could not have conducted its invasion of France without oil from American sources. This is a disturbing piece of the puzzle, indeed.
How does one explain this indifference? Wiesel, who was speaking, I hasten to say, in front of the Clintons while Bill was still in office, asks this question directly. When he brings up other crimes committed by humans against other humans, the question only grows in volume. Why do people shrug their shoulders in the face of so much pain, so much suffering, so much evil?
Is the answer psychological in nature? I had a professor as an undergraduate to proclaimed that, had we been living in Germany in the 1930s, barring obvious racial considerations, we would all be Nazis. We are more herd animal than we care to accept. Even when the issue is glaring, our impulse is to do nothing on our own. We defer to the group. And nothing gets done. Collective inattention, indifference, apathy. Armchair statesmen might rally and proclaim that they would certainly take a stand, but history and human behavior point to a different reality.
Wiesel’s speech ends with a litany of unanswered questions. And that makes sense because they amount to a plea, not so much for the old man Wiesel is becoming, but for the child – the one who experienced the camps – who has never left him as well as the children of the new millennium, marching into the future with fear and hope, hope and fear. Perhaps the one remedy to indifference is to see the children as belonging to all of us. A parent would point out the broccoli. A parent would turn on the light. We already have our model, after all –not my Father or your Father but ours.
