The ones who walk away

And who seem to know where they are going

I want to be there when everyone suddenly understands what it has all been for.

—Ivan Karamazov

On 4 October 1943, Heinrich Himmler stood before 92 SS officers in a room within the Posen Townhall (Rathaus)—Posen being a Nazi-occupied town in central-west Poland—and committed the logic of the Final Solution, of which he was Hitler’s primary overseer, to the official record more clearly and unambiguously than in any surviving document we have of that time.¹

This meeting, and a subsequent one two days later on the same topic, addressed to Reichsleiters, Gauleiters, and other Nazi government representatives, was top secret, and it is something of a fluke that we know anything about these speeches.²

You can sense an almost wistful, more-in-sorrow-than-anger tone to Himmler’s hideous words.³ He explains to his underlings the absolute necessity for the extermination of the Jews of Europe while acknowledging that some of those listening to him may have had nagging qualms about the scale and nature of the task that, as he saw it, history had handed him, his colleagues, and his Führer.

He was particularly concerned, as he stood there, reasonably and calmly, in his Reichsführer SS uniform, to explain to his audience the necessity of the slaughter of Jewish children.

“I must ask you only to listen to what I tell you in this group and never to speak about it. We were asked: What about the women and children? I made up my mind to find a clear solution here too. You see, I did not feel I had a right to exterminate the men – that is, kill them or have them killed – while allowing the children to grow up and take revenge upon our sons and grandsons. We had to reach the difficult decision of making this nation vanish from the face of the earth.”

.… “It is hideous and frightful for a German to see such things. It is so, and if we had not felt it to be hideous and frightful, we should not have been Germans. However hideous it may be, it has been necessary for us to do it, and it will be necessary in many other cases. If we lose our nerve now, we shall pass weak nerves on to our sons and grandsons.”

The disgusting, deluded, deep-baked barbarism of the Nazi Weltanschauung (worldview) is laid out more fully in Himmler’s casual, almost gentle argumentation than it is, to my way of thinking, in any of Hitler’s messianic rants.

In an essay about the French philosopher and mystic, Simone Weil, Polish poet and writer, Czesław Miłosz, writes, “It happens sometimes that old enigmas of mankind are kept dormant or veiled for several generations, then recover their vitality and are formulated in a new language. And the problem is: who can justify the suffering of the innocent?”

Many is the answer, as it turns out—as not just the past shows us—and yet the protection of the innocent, of children, remains a bedrock standard of decency. Across generations and cultures, it is the ultimate line in the sand. Even comedians like Anthony Jeselnik use jokes about harming children as determinative proof of their unassailable, out-there, shock-value bone fides. Nothing is more shocking.

In her wonderful short story/parable, from which I borrowed the name for this post, Ursula K. LeGuin makes the mistreatment of children central to the story she is telling. The utopian town of Omelas relies for its pristine perfection and unbridled happiness on the torture of a child, a fact the town’s inhabitants, as they grow up, become aware of.

In a basement under one of the beautiful public buildings of Omelas, or perhaps in the cellar of one of its spacious private homes, there is a room. It has one locked door, and no window. A little light seeps in dustily between cracks in the boards, secondhand from a cobwebbed window somewhere across the cellar. In one corner of the little room a couple of mops, with stiff, clotted, foul-smelling heads, stand near a rusty bucket. The floor is dirt, a little damp to the touch, as cellar dirt usually is.

…In the room, a child is sitting. It could be a boy or a girl. It looks about six, but actually is nearly ten. It is feeble-minded. Perhaps it was born defective, or perhaps it has become imbecile through fear, malnutrition, and neglect. It picks its nose and occasionally fumbles vaguely with its toes or genitals, as it sits hunched in the corner farthest from the bucket and the two mops. It is afraid of the mops. It finds them horrible. It shuts its eyes, but it knows the mops are still standing there; and the door is locked; and nobody will come. The door is always locked; and nobody ever comes, except that sometimes…the door rattles terribly and opens, and a person, or several people, are there. One of them may come in and kick the child to make it stand up. The others never come close, but peer in at it with frightened, disgusted eyes. The food bowl and the water jug are hastily filled, the door is locked; the eyes disappear. The people at the door never say anything, but the child, who has not always lived in the tool room, and can remember sunlight and its mother's voice, sometimes speaks. "I will be good, " it says. "Please let me out. I will be good!" They never answer. The child used to scream for help at night, and cry a good deal…It is so thin there are no calves to its legs; its belly protrudes; it lives on a half-bowl of corn meal and grease a day. It is naked. Its buttocks and thighs are a mass of festered sores, as it sits in its own excrement continually.

It seems LeGuin got the idea for this story from a chapter of Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamzov titled “Rebellion”. There, Ivan Karamazov explains to his brother, Alyosha, a novice priest, his belief that it is impossible to love your neighbour. Perhaps at a distance, Ivan allows, or in the abstract, “but at close quarters it is impossible.” The exception, he says, might involve children. The existence of children “weakens my argument,” as “children can be loved even at close quarters, even when they are dirty, even when they are ugly (I fancy, though, children never are ugly).”⁴

Ivan undertakes, for his brother’s consideration, a dissertation on the ways in which decent people, the inheritors of the knowledge of good and evil, the parents and protectors, routinely abuse children, and he gives examples, from his own knowledge, of a five-year-old girl tortured by her educated parents, beaten and locked in a freezing outhouse overnight; of children being overworked, underfed, and mistreated by their guardians; of a seven-year-old girl constantly beaten by her mother. He gives the example of the Turkish army in Bulgaria who “burn villages, murder, outrage women and children…” In particular “These Turks took a pleasure in torturing children, too; cutting the unborn child from the mother’s womb, and tossing babies up in the air and catching them on the points of their bayonets before their mothers’ eyes.”

He wonders how any of this has a place in God’s great plan. More than that, he wonders how any plan that includes the mistreatment of children—makes such suffering part of the means to justify an ends—could dare call itself just.

"If everyone has to suffer in order to bring about eternal harmony through that suffering, tell me, please, what have children to do with this? It's quite incomprehensible that they too should have to suffer, that they too should have to pay for harmony by their suffering."

He asks his brother, Alyosha, the question that LeGuin took as the premise of her “Omelas” story: “Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last, but that it was essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature - that baby beating its breast with its fist, for instance - and to found that edifice on its unavenged tears, would you consent to be the architect on those conditions?”

Ultimately, Ivan answers his own question: “It's not worth one little tear from one single little tortured child... [I]f the suffering of children is required to make up the total suffering necessary to attain the truth, then I say here and now that no truth is worth such a price.”

He says, “Why should they….furnish material to enrich the soil for the harmony of the future? I understand solidarity in sin among men. I understand solidarity in retribution, too; but there can be no such solidarity with children. And if it is really true that they must share responsibility for all their fathers’ crimes, such a truth is not of this world and is beyond my comprehension.”

In the “Omelas” story, LeGuin tells us that “At times one of the adolescent girls or boys who go see the child does not go home to weep or rage, does not, in fact, go home at all. Sometimes also a man or a woman much older falls silent for a day or two, then leaves home. These people go out into the street, and walk down the street alone.

“…They go on. They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.”

Ivan Karamazov’s question about whether we would allow ourselves to be “the architect of those conditions” arises afresh in every generation, in fact, in every moment. It is inescapable, and you don’t need to invoke anyone’s god or anyone’s politics or anyone’s history to answer it. The answer is always the same, that such justice is not worth the tear of one tortured child.

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1. For a complete list of Himmler’s speeches, see this archive.

2. The full account of what survived and what didn’t, of the edits Himmler himself made of the transcripts etc is beyond my scope here. Worth noting that discredited historian, antisemite and Holocaust denier, David Irving, used the Posen speeches, and Himmler’s notes and corrections of them, to support (unsuccessfully) his contention that Hitler played no part in the planning and execution of the Final Solution (see, for instance, this).

3. Historian Richard Breitman writes: “His voice was of middle range — neither deep nor high-pitched. He spoke clearly, deliberately, and emphatically, but for the most part
dispassionately, much like a schoolmaster reviewing a long and somewhat
complicated lesson for his pupils. At one point he actually talked about
giving out a grade if he had to judge a certain performance.”

4. My understanding is that LeGuin got the idea for the “Omelas” story from reading The Brothers Karamazov, though it came to her via a piece by Henry James. It is clear “Omelas” and the “Rebellion” section of Karamazov are related.