Homo Homini Lupus Est.



From John Derbyshire:



At a friend’s house the other day, I was introduced to an elderly female relative of his. The family is Jewish, and this old lady was born in Poland in the 1930s. Was she there when the war broke out? I asked, once sufficient acquaintance had been established. Yes, she said, she had. But how on earth had she survived? I asked, knowing that it was in Poland that the Final Solution was brought closest to finality. Well, she told me, she had left Warsaw and stayed with family friends in the countryside. These people, who were Gentiles, had kept her hidden through the whole of the war. After the war she had got out and come to America.



What a story! We all know this stuff, of course, but it is still very moving to hear it from the lips of an eyewitness. Well, later in the evening, the old lady now off in another room, my host cornered me and asked what I had been speaking to her about. I said she had told me the story of being hidden by Gentiles during the war. My friend nodded sadly. “That’s her cover story,” he said. What did he mean? “Well, when the war started, her family actually fled from Poland to the USSR. They had a hard enough time there, goodness knows — WW2 in the USSR was no picnic. But when she came to the States, the Cold War was on, and she was afraid that if she said she’d been living in the USSR, she’d be deported as a suspected communist. So she made up the other story. Still, today, she doesn’t feel totally safe, so she still tells people that story.”



In a way, the old lady’s little act of fearful deception is more telling about the state of affairs in the middle of the 20th century than the original, made-up, version. That fear — mainly fear of communism, but also a generalized fear of any state authority, even America’s — had sunk so deep into her very bones that she clung to her invented tale fifty years on, rather than take the chance of being informed on and deported. Good grief! What a safe, secure, smug, careless world we have the wonderful good fortune to be living in! Somewhere in our conversation the old lady had mentioned the monument to the dead at Dachau, which bears the inscription Homo homini lupus est — “Man is a wolf to man.” Is such evil really part of our human constitution? Yes, it is. May we never forget it