Reflections on war.

[rivka]

Remarkable service at church yesterday, and I don't say that just because curiousangel was heavily involved.

The theme was "reflections on war," yesterday being close to both Veterans Day and U.N. Sunday. Michael's written about it at length - you should definitely read down to the end, where he's appended the piece he read as part of the sermon. It's quite a difficult task to preach to a bunch of committed pacifists about the occasional necessity of war, and do it in a way that won't snap their minds shut. Michael did a great job of it.

The person who spoke just before him was an elderly psychiatrist who'd been a medical officer in the Army. Just after World War II, he was stationed in Nuremburg, where he found that he was expected to supply medical care to prisoners of war as well as U.S. troops. Here is the story he told:

A former military governor accused of ordering the deaths of thousands of Jews and Poles tried to commit suicide by overdosing on smuggled-in barbiturates. He survived and was taken to the hospital with pneumonia. The psychiatrist begrudged treating the military governor with his limited stock of penicillin, and wished he would die, but in obedience to his Hippocratic oath and the requirements of the Army he provided the correct medical care. He stationed two guards, Latvian soldiers, to prevent a second suicide attempt. What he didn't do was respond to the military governor's anguish. He wanted to hold someone's hand and pour out his guilt, his feelings, his acute depression, and the appalled psychiatrist turned his head away.

One night the Lativan guards took the military governor to the outhouse and offered him back the cord to his bathrobe, which had been removed for his own safety. They stood aside while he hanged himself. The elderly psychiatrist told us, "the next time I saw my patient was when I cut his body down and pronounced him dead."

At the time, he felt no guilt. He wrote to his father about his vague feelings of guilt for not feeling guilty, but mostly he just wished that the governor had lived long enough to suffer appropriately for the horrors he had caused. It wasn't until years later that he started to wonder: is it ever acceptable for one person to deny the basic humanity of another? Does treating anyone - however much he seems to be the embodiment of evil - as less than human perpetuate his wrongs rather than counterbalancing them?

I can't think of the last time that I heard a story in church that affected me so deeply, and provoked so much reflection on my core moral beliefs. I don't know what I would have done, in his place. I don't even really know what I would want to have done. And I'm just in awe of him, of the strength of him, to get up in front of a hundred and thirty people and tell that story about himself.

Comments

[bcholmes.livejournal.com]

I think had a similar experience a few years ago. I was participating in an event in which people were sharing some very personal and very difficult stuff. One woman, a person I had known for a while, described her recognition that she was abusing a child in her care. This had happened years and years earlier and she had received help (as had the child) and she was now in a place where she had forgiven herself.

It was, for me, a moment that affected me profoundly. First, like you, I was in awe that she was able to reveal that story about herself. Secondly, I had to reflect on that a lot. In a moment, she had become two things that my mind couldn't easily reconcile: she was my friend, and she was a child abuser.

Some people in that group were appalled at the woman, and there was, unfortunately, a detrimental effect on the group dynamics after that. I was in a different place because she had been my friend and I knew her as a good person. But it really made me think about the capacity to forgive and to see humanity in the people who do horrible things.

[wild-irises.livejournal.com]

About 15 years ago I was involved when an (at the time) extremely close friend was approached by a young woman he had abused some years previously when she was a girl and he was living with her mother. Watching his process in coming to terms with her confrontation shook up just about almost everything I believed.

[wild-irises.livejournal.com]

One thing that strikes me about this very moving story is how much it and its companions seem to be cropping up in the wider culture. A fictional version forms the beginning of Mary Doria Russell's A Thread of Grace, and someone told me a variant in conversation within the last two months. It seems like there's a sense of people repenting for specifically Nazi war crimes (and respondents not knowing how to deal with that desire to repent) out there ... I wonder what that's about.

[perigee.livejournal.com]

I haven't the time, unfortunately, to read the link you provided. Perhaps later.

I did, however, read the story you related, that the psychiatrist related, and I think it's a terribly difficult choice, morally and ethically. There is also another issue. If the psychiatrist had comforted the governor, would the Latvian guards have done harm to him? There was a dynamic there that the governor may have been aware of and reaching for, of moral capital, that, if comforted, the governor may have been able to take for himself at the psychiatrist's expense.

I would have been terribly torn and probably opted for self-protective coldness towards the governor myself, out of a need for survival as well as out of the same kind of mechanism that is hard, hard won in me, and that is vitally important to me: being able to identify very poor risks and being able to identify people who are likely to throw me over for their own convenience rather than do the work they should personally be doing to make amends.

[johnpalmer.livejournal.com]

Ouch... I don't know what I would have wanted to do either.

I'm not sure what healing even *means* in that situation, is what it comes down to. I'm glad that he treated the physical problems, at least. At least that's in a realm I can handle and accept.