CYNTHIA OZICK
49
known as Yad Vashem: a memorial to the Six Million, a place of
mourning, a substitute for the missing headstones of the victims; there are
no graveyards for human beings ground into bone meal and flown into
evanescent smoke. But Yad Vashem is also a grove of celebration and
honor: a grand row of trees, one for each savior, marks the valor of the
Christian rescuers of Europe, called the Righteous Among the Nations.
Mordechai Paldiel, the director of the Department for the Righteous at
Yad Vashem, writing in
TheJeYllsalem Post
not long ago, offered some
arresting reflections on the "normality" of goodness:
Weare somehow determined to view these benefactors as
heroes: hence the search for underlying motives. The Righteous per–
sons, however, consider themselves as anything but heroes, and regard
their behavior during the Holocaust as quite normal. How to resolve
this enigma?
For centuries we have undergone a brain-washing process by
philosophers who emphasized man's despicable character, highlighting
his egotistic and evil disposition at the expense of other attributes.
Wittingly or not, together with Hobbes and Freud, we accept the
proposition that man is essentially an aggressive being, bent on de–
struction, involved principally with himself, and only marginally in–
terested in the needs of others....
Goodness leaves us gasping, for we refuse to recognize it as a
natural human attribute. So off we go on a long search for some
hidden motivation, some extraordinary explanation, for such peculiar
behavior.
Evil is, by contrast, less painfully assimilated. There is no com–
parable search for the reasons for its constant manifestation (although
in earlier centuries theologians pondered this issue).
We have come to terms with evil. Television, movies and the
printed word have made evil, aggression and egotism household terms
and unconsciously acceptable to the extent of making us immune to
displays of evil. There is a danger that the evil of the Holocaust will
be absorbed in a similar manner; that is, explained away as further
confirmation of man 's inherent disposition to wrongdoing. It con–
firms our visceral feeling that man is an irredeemable beast, who needs
to be constrained for his own good.
In searching for an explanation of the motivations of the
Righteous Among the Nations, are we not really saying: what was
wrong with them? Are we not, in a deeper sense, implying that their
behavior was something other than normal? . . . Is acting
benevolently and altruistically such an outlandish and unusual type of
behavior, supposedly at odds with man 's inherent character, as to
justify a meticulous search for explanations? Or is it conceivable that
such behavior is as natural to our psychological constitution as the
