Never Forget: No Man is an Island
Who was responsible for the Holocaust? Of course there were the Nazis, but what role did the average citizen under Hitler’s rule play? Since social pressures can color our behavior in profound ways, Europeans in WWII might have been complicit in war crimes, not realizing that the external forces of governments and religious institutions were manipulating their behavior.
The contrast between four heroic French women who risked their lives for Jewish souls, and the entire country of Holland that sad idly by as the Holocaust slaughtered millions offers a lesson in the influence that social factors had on individuals during the turmoil of WWII.
Sisters in Resistance tells the story of four non-Jewish, French women, who spearheaded a grassroots movement to undermine Hitler’s cause. French women played a marginal role in national government before the war, the documentary explains — they couldn’t vote, and they couldn’t hold a bank account. Their country had disenfranchised them. Ironically, their previously-silenced female voices became the nation’s most vociferous, abandoning self-concern to protest the Nazi invasion and Germany’s annexation of most of France. These women felt they had nothing to lose and sounded a crie de guerre, whereas their male counterparts remained reticent.
Not only did French women speak out against the German occupation, but they also fought for Jewish emancipation. Perhaps they could identify with the Jewish plight, because they understood what it was like to be at the mercy of others — especially since their own country had limited their freedoms. French men, on the other hand, had a more difficult time seeing through Jewish eyes, perhaps because they had always enjoyed personal liberties and didn’t understand the sacrifices taking place around them.
Unlike the brave French women who symbolized France’s voice of dissent, the Dutch were notoriously indifferent toward the Jewish extermination. With more Jews killed in Holland than in any other European country, they were sometimes thought to be in cahoots with the Nazis.
Goodbye Holland Director Willy Lindwer attempts to uncover the reason for Holland’s inaction during the Holocaust. Were the individual Dutch citizens evil or morally corrupt? Lindwer concludes that the individuals’ inaction in the Holocaust is rooted in the influence of larger Dutch social institutions.
Holland was a far more religious nation than France, and Lindwer asserts that this attitude made Holland as a whole predisposed to anti-Semitism. Under the influence of Holland’s Catholic Church, anti-Semitism became institutionalized, his subjects opine, noting that because Catholicism was a cornerstone of Dutch culture, Jews were alienated from the community, and seen as a divisive force. As a result, those interviewed declare, many Dutch people sympathized with the Nazi cause. “The Germans were silently welcomed here by the majority,” asserts a subject of the film.
Holland’s willingness to comply with Nazi authority can also be attributed to the bureaucratic ethos that typified the nation’s government. “Many people, and certainly officials, had the idea that they are just spokes in the wheel, [while] decisions are made by the higher ups,” says the current mayor of Groningen, Jaques Wallage, in the film, asserting that the Dutch were culturally-programmed to follow orders unquestioningly. Holland’s political system depended on blind obedience to authority; compliance was viewed as a virtue, never a vice. Today’s Dutch citizens declare in Goodbye Holland that it must therefore have been easy for the Nazis to gain the masses’ unwavering support.
While not all French women fought the Nazis, and not all Dutch citizens complied with them, it’s worth exploring the societal influences that influenced their behavior during the war, whether or not they were cognizant of the influence at the time. The point isn’t to say that the heroines of Sisters in Resistance weren’t acting consciously, or that the inactive Dutch couldn’t have escaped the model their society set. But both of these films help us answer the basic questions of how the average person acts when confronted with evil.
“No man is an island” is a phrase that’s often bandied about. But the truth behind it has quite a lot of relevance, as these two films demonstrate.
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