2.1 Post-conflict Narrative Landscapes
Mass violence relies on stories about who must die. These stories emerge first as propaganda that promotes dehumanization and exclusion of the targeted group. Narratives of exclusion even circulate in children’s books, as they did in Germany prior to World War II, telling stories about Jews as poisonous mushrooms. Several survivors I interviewed recalled seeing these books, now commonly on display at Holocaust museums. These kinds of messages now circulate through social media platforms at an unprecedented pace. Divisive discourses come from within as well as from the outside by foreigners looking to destabilize a community. Those propagating the narratives suggest the need to eradicate or at least respond forcefully to evil others. In so doing, they position themselves as the potential heroes.
Maintaining authoritarian control requires controling information and interpretation of that information. Citizens subjected to government-sanctioned media campaigns struggle to discern constructed threats from real ones. Through social media platforms, torrents of disinformation produce paralysis. Other messages are more carefully calibrated, strategically oriented toward producing shifts in public sympathies (Krafft and Donovan Reference Krafft and Donovan2020).
Are these messages attempts to grab power, or genuinely harkening to a time (or time to come) when group cohesion was (or will be) necessary for survival, or some mixture of both? Regardless, the out-group finds itself labeled the “perpetrator,” those with real or perceived threats to this group become the “victims,” and those challenging the regime’s exclusion attempts find themselves labeled “terrorists.”
In post-conflict contexts, the roles that change the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion continue to exert influence. If the regime loses, the so-called perpetrators are recast as victims and the self-proclaimed heroes during the violence become the perpetrators. During World War II, members of the Nazi regime proclaimed the Jews were poisoning Europe, but after the war found themselves labeled perpetrators. While many times this reframing corrects distortion, Hannah Arendt (Reference Arendt1998) warned us that these binary constructions invite totalizing responses to the named perpetrator, paving the road to totalitarianism.
In this chapter, I demonstrate how idealized or exaggerated conceptions of conflict parties (victim, hero, and perpetrator) act as attractors, returning us to the binary constructions that lead us back into violence.Footnote 1 I then propose an alternative construction. To make this argument, I use a case study of the conflict over the French National Railways’ (SNCF’s) multiple roles in World War II to show how polarizing discourse limits responses to harm.
While many consider how propaganda contributes to violence prior to and during war, fewer consider story construction in the aftermath. German philosopher Karl Jaspers observed that “the cast has changed,” but the dramatic casting continues. Those labeled the enemy (or perpetrator) during violence become the victims and those allegedly saving others from this enemy become perpetrators. Enemies can even become heroes. Members of the French Resistance, for example, labeled “terrorists” by occupying Germans, became heroes after World War II. The newly assigned roles become truth as quickly as the old ones are discarded, making this post-violence period fragile and prone to distortion. How the new regime distributes accountability, roles, and guilt ultimately influences whether the society will experience lasting, positive peace – a peace that includes justice and equity as well as an absence of violence.Footnote 2 To interrupt cycles of violence without offering impunity, Karl Jaspers and Raul Hilberg encourage us to resist the stereotypes that produce violence and instead focus on the relative guilt and innocence of each person or group.
The ashes of the Nazi collapse had barely cooled when Jaspers began this work on collective guilt. He offered a series of lectures in Germany expressing his concern that a focus on a small group of complicit individuals obscured the implicit guilt of all German people. Published under the title, The Question of German Guilt (1946), Jaspers (Reference Jaspers2009) proclaimed that German political and cultural renewal would require self-reflection by the entire populace. He urged each person to assess his or her own guilt relative to their own participation. In doing so, he believed, all levels of perpetration could be accounted for without burying Germany in a quagmire of guilt from which it could never emerge. He argued that every role was crucial in creating the catastrophe, but also in helping people emerge from it. He understood that idealizations of victims, perpetrators, and heroes in the aftermath of war would thwart the transformative potential of national reckoning in post-conflict contexts.
Jaspers, however, stopped short. After people have discussed and grieved their roles, what happens next? The individuals who participated via direct action, distant action, or inaction can do more than reflect; they can engage in the active work of restoration. They lost this sense of self-governance while under authoritarian rule. There is another consequence of post-conflict narratives that privilege idealized roles and sideline the average person: Older generations may pass on stories that warn the youth to avoid victimization without teaching them how to guard against the influence of propaganda and eventually reigniting old, politically storied grievances and participating in renewed violence.
To clarify, advocating for complex understandings is not the same as saying that “there were good people on both sides.” In differing degrees, harm can be inflicted by an ordinary individual as well as by a sociopath with power. We can demand accountability for harmful acts without seeing those who caused the harm as purely evil, either individually or collectively. Yet, in this age of accountability, significant collateral damage can result from hurtling unquestioningly forward, guided by binary constructions of victim and perpetrator (Hinton Reference Hinton2016). More restorative and re-integrative approaches to post-conflict intervention liberate the victim from having to demonstrate angelic purity or prove that the accused is irredeemably evil.
2.2 Case Study: The French National Railways
To demonstrate these dynamics, I will discuss the French National Railways (SNCF), an entity with approximately 400,000 wartime employees that performed multiple roles during World War II. The SNCF can be narrated as a victim of the German occupation, a perpetrator in the Holocaust, and a hero in the resistance. In the multi-decade, transnational debates over the company’s obligation to make amends for its role in the Holocaust, binary representations constrained debates over the SNCF’s wartime operations. I will illustrate this phenomenon of role idealization and how it can thwart meaningful amends-making. Long-term positive peace – a peace defined by equity and inclusion as much as by the absence of violence – requires that we resist these idealized abstractions and instead increase our comfort with the complexity of the human experience, the moral shifts, and shades of gray (Bouris Reference Bouris2007).
The findings I present here emerged from my work tracing the company’s wartime activities using archival research as well as through 130 interviews with SNCF executives, ambassadors, lawyers, Jewish leaders, legislators, historians, and archivists, including 90 Jewish individuals who survived persecution in France during the war. I used participant observation during key legislative and commemorative events to trace these narrative dynamics. Working pro bono for the US House of Representatives, the US State Department, and The Washington Post while following national and international media coverage also gave me access to the different social constructions of the SNCF. I then constructed a narrative map of the conflict that noted the different constructions of the company and the SNCF’s response to these constructions. The comprehensive findings can be found in Last Train to Auschwitz: The French National Railways and the Journey to Accountability (Federman Reference Federman2021). In this chapter, I focus on how the social constructions of ideal victims, ideal perpetrators, and ideal heroes affected the recent debates over the company’s need to atone for its role in the Holocaust.
Debates over the SNCF culminated in what may be one of the last Holocaust-related compensation settlements. In February 2019, forty-nine Holocaust survivors received almost a half million dollars for losses that occurred more than seventy years previously. Roughly thirty individuals received $100,000 for the deaths of their spouses, while others received smaller sums for harms deemed less consequential. This settlement developed out of a multi-decade conflict about the actions of the SNCF in World War II that began first in France and moved to the United States. After lawsuits that called on the SNCF to compensate survivors for its role in deporting them or their families reached a dead-end in French courts, the debates moved to the United States where the company’s business interests brought the conflict to Virginia, Florida, Maryland, New York, and California. Lawsuits, legislation, and boycott campaigns prompted the French government and US Department of State to intervene.
What kept the SNCF debates alive for so long was that the conflict lent itself to idealized social conceptions of victims, perpetrators, and heroes.Footnote 3 These ideals contributed to what Donileen Loseke (Reference Loseke2003) calls “formula stories,” the kinds of stories that are of great interest to mass media because of the evocative popular appeal of their gruesome details, the extreme nature of the harm, and the unquestioned innocence of the victims. The SNCF debates fit into a subgenre that I will call the justice story. In justice stories, parties in the conflict are positioned (and position themselves) relative to ideals that lead to highlighting certain individuals or groups, while expunging others. This case study demonstrates how the company’s wartime roles lend themselves to such idealization.
The French National Railways became a national conglomerate just two years before the Germans occupied France – a “national railway” in the nation’s consciousness only twenty-four months before it became a tool of the German occupier. The armistice with Germany signed on June 22, 1940 placed the railway company under German control (Convention Franco-Allemande d’Armistice 1940). During the occupation, the SNCF transported – for a fee – German soldiers, munitions, coal, and other goods necessary to support the war effort, as well as transporting fleeing refugees, paying customers, and the goods necessary to keep the French people alive. The Germans paid a fraction of the amounts invoiced. The company struggled under the demand, employees were carried off to forced labor, and the war took a toll on rail tracks and rolling stock.
While in many ways a victim of the Occupation, the SNCF could also be portrayed as a perpetrator, responsible for transporting, without resistance, roughly 76,000 deportees crammed horrifically into merchandise cars (often referred to as “cattle cars”) headed for the German border. Members of the Nazi SS and other Nazi officials met these deportation trains near the German border, replacing SNCF drivers with other drivers who then drove the deportees to Auschwitz. Most were murdered either in the gas chambers, through forced labor, or died from other complications of abuse or starvation. Only around 3,500 returned alive.
Yet, the SNCF was long storied solely as a hero of the war. It received its government-awarded designation as a wartime hero for the actions of a number of brave railwaymen who helped sabotage trains filled with German armaments as the allies landed on the beaches of Normandy. Their efforts aided the liberation of France. Throughout the war, well over 1,000 SNCF employees (of the 400,000 employees) thwarted the German efforts through coordinated and independent acts. These acts, however, occurred in direct opposition to the orders of SNCF executives, who more often sought to appease the occupier. The more surveillance imposed by the Germans, the less freedom they had to go about their work. Resistance activities threatened this independence.
So, was the SNCF a victim, hero, or perpetrator during World War II? With so many employees spread throughout the country, engaged in so many different activities, pinpointing a singular identity for the SNCF is difficult. Like most French people, most SNCF employees simply tried to survive the war. Some risked their lives to help others in dire need, but most did not. The French government and SNCF strategically amplified the hero narrative after the war, hoping to use the SNCF as a site upon which to rebuild French pride. The following considers the shifting public articulation of these competing identities in the decades following the war.
2.3 Narrative Dynamics: French National Railways Debates
I saw a train pass by; at the head of the train, a wagon containing the French military police and the German soldiers. Then, came the cattle cars, packed. The skinny arms of children clinging to the bars. A hand outside flapping like a leaf in a storm. When the train stopped, voices cried, “Momma!”
2.3.1 Ideal Victims
Sociologist and criminologist Nils Christie (Reference Christie and Fattah1986) coined the term ideal victim, as the injured party for whom the public feels immediate sympathy. He illustrated this concept with the somewhat fanciful example of a little old lady on her way home from tending to an ill sister, robbed at gunpoint in broad daylight by a drug addict. Her innocence (no mixed intent), purity (caring for her sister), vulnerability (advanced age), and common sense (walking in broad daylight) rest uncontested in this short narrative. For these reasons, she demands our sympathy. Socially we consider someone to be deserving of this sympathy when no responsibility can be attributed to the victim and the individual or group is deemed morally upright (Loseke Reference Loseke2003). Ideal victims are not necessarily the most harmed by an event, but those who receive unquestioned recognition of their victimhood (Christie Reference Christie and Fattah1986). That the violence struck the most innocent of beings ignites the sense of our own vulnerability. We empathize with them while we fear for ourselves.
Ideal victims also exist in the context of mass violence. Groups and individuals jockey for this coveted position because perceived purity and international sympathy can come with a number of crucial benefits. Firstly, they achieve immediate social recognition.Footnote 4 People may receive compensation, refugee status, or other victim services. To make visible the narrative architecture of ideal victimhood is not to deny that victims exist as sufferers of very real violence but is to say that many may pay a price for their coveted position. When speaking of the harm they experienced (and from which many continue to suffer), Martha Minow observes that individuals “often adhere to an unspoken norm that prefers narratives of helplessness to stories of responsibility and tales of victimization to narratives of human agency and capacity” (Minow Reference Minow, Brooks and Gerwitz1996, 33). Victims who do not fit this norm may be sidelined in various ways. As victims find their power – shaping their roles, for example, as “survivors” with voice and political power – they lose some public sympathy. Publics tend to prefer their victims without agency.
For decades, Holocaust victims, in this sense, served as a benchmark for “ideal victims” in the context of mass atrocity (Bouris Reference Bouris2007; Van Wijk Reference Van Wijk2013). This took time. For the first decades after the war, Holocaust survivors were not identified as a separate victim group. When the atrocities became widely known – due in part to television programs and films – many felt great pity for the victims. When Kaminer (Reference Kaminer2004) produced a hierarchy of suffering, Holocaust survivors topped her list. Transitional justice scholars increasingly express concern about these hierarchies of suffering.Footnote 5 Competing with other groups for legitimacy detracts attention from those who enacted the harm. The killing fields of Cambodia need not be compared to Holocaust death camps for their collective victims to be worthy of our care and attention.
Survivors of these and other sites of hell on earth ought not be required to demonstrate an unsullied past to prove their victimhood. Yet, the image of the purest victim still garners more of our sympathy. The quote that opens this section describes children’s arms extending from openings of railcars headed to death camps as they call out for their parents. This image cannot easily be forgotten. Likely every child in that convoy was murdered in a gas chamber. These children become the benchmark victim against whom others must measure themselves.
Over time, some groups who received less recognition developed “Holocaust envy” (Novick Reference Novick1999). Armenians, Bosnians, Rwandans, Indonesians, and Cambodians have all suffered genocides, as have Indigenous peoples in the Americas, Australia, Africa, and elsewhere. And to this list we now add the Rohingyas in Myanmar, the Yazidis in northern Iraq, and the Uyghurs in China.
Amidst the enormous suffering caused by these past and on-going genocides, how did the SNCF capture so much public attention decades after the events? The conflict made front-page news in the 1990s in France and again in 2014–2016 in both France and the United States. Firstly, by the 1990s, the remaining Holocaust survivors had been children at the time of the war and were now quite elderly and frail. In other words, they represented the “vulnerable child” and “little old lady” all in one.
Survivors’ stories struck a chord with the public and helped convince legislators that the SNCF had not sufficiently made amends for its role in the Holocaust. Leo Bretholz’s story in particular moved Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley to sign legislation requiring the SNCF to digitize its wartime archives before bidding for contracts in the state. As a child, Bretholz escaped out of a moving railcar headed toward Auschwitz. Who could deny his last wish for the SNCF’s transparency, apology, and accountability? And, in fact, he did die between Maryland House and Maryland Senate meetings in which lawmakers were deliberating how to handle new SNCF bids for state projects.
His death made his requests all the more poignant. In life, Bretholz was more complex. The day of his memorial, family members say he begrudgingly joined the fight against the SNCF and toward the end of his life became “Holocausted-out.” Some family members had also tired of hearing incessant talk of the Holocaust. He was, in fact, human. Formulaic stories, however, rely on caricatures of almost angelic purity.
It is often easier to do this with the dead or the silent. Violence interrupts speech. I met a number of survivors who still could not say much about the past. In that vacuum, the justice story takes over. In the presence of silence, the work becomes, “to make more present the life that was taken and to vocalize the suffering the murder caused” (Gewirtz Reference Gewirtz1996, 867). In death, victims become larger than life. Silences can amplify their victimhood and thereby shape responses to violence (Murphy Reference Murphy2017).
2.3.2 Ideal Perpetrators
… SNCF carried out its transports with precision, cruelty and deception. On each convoy, we were packed into 20 cattle cars, 50 people each. For the entire multi-day trip, we were given only one piece of triangular cheese, one stale piece of bread and no water. There was hardly room to stand or sit, and in the middle of the train was a single bucket to relieve ourselves.
Of the 1,000 people on my train, only five survived the war. I was one of the lucky ones. I jumped out of the moving train, managing to pry open the bars on the window just enough to slip through.
I even have a copy of an invoice SNCF sent the French government, seeking payment for the services it provided. They pursued payment on this after the liberation of Paris, after the Nazis were gone. They even charged interest for late payments. This was not coercion, this was business …
The sustained debate over the SNCF’s need to make amends was not just a result of public sympathy for victims. This conflict also had an ideal perpetrator. In his later work, Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg differentiated between perpetrators. Of course, the Final Solution had its chief architects but it also had what he called functionaries, newcomers, non-German government, non-German volunteers, and a cadre of lawyers and physicians (Hilberg Reference Hilberg1993). Although Hilberg and others expanded public attention beyond the chief architects of the Holocaust, certain individuals and entities found themselves in the spotlight more than others. What attributes did these favorite perpetrators embody?
Clearly not every corporate participant faced such scrutiny. In Washington, DC, those fighting the SNCF in legal and legislative battles might throw on a Hugo Boss coat as they headed out the door, ride a Thyssen–Krupp elevator down to the metro, where a Siemens Corporation advertisement tried to catch their attention. They might pass their time waiting for the train by checking their JP Morgan investments on their smartphone. Market volatility might bring on a headache that could be soothed with a Bayer Aspirin chased down by a sip of their Peet’s Coffee. Upon entering their office, they might grab a Krispy Kreme donut left in the lobby by a thoughtful employee to stave off hunger until noon when they might head to Panera Bread for lunch for a sandwich and a Fanta soda. No one thought to challenge any these companies with Nazi roots and involvements. Why not? What was it about the trains, and, for that matter, these French trains, that fueled this conflict for the past two decades? France did not initiate World War II.
This became a driving question of my research, why the SNCF and not other companies? I found that the SNCF was not just any perpetrator, it was an ideal perpetrator (Federman Reference Federman2018). While the ideal victim framework has circulated since the 1980s, the corresponding perpetrator framework had been understudied, making it hard for those of us studying those who committed the acts. Christie (Reference Christie and Fattah1986) offered, in-passing, that ideal offenders must exist in equal proportion to their ideal victims.Footnote 6 In the context of transitional justice, McEvoy and McConnachie (Reference McEvoy and McConnachie2012) agreed, claiming that the “innocent” victim should be the binary opposite of the “Bogeyman,” an evil spirit who commits murder. To suffice in this role, perpetrators must transcend banality. Only inhumanity can destroy humanity.
Through the study of the SNCF conflict, I identified specific attributes of the ideal offenders that juxtapose the attributes of the ideal victim identified by Christie. Ideal perpetrators are perceived as (1) strong, (2) abstract, (3) representative of the nature of the harm, and (4) publicly identified by a justice hero who keeps them and their victims in the spotlight (Federman Reference Federman2018).
The SNCF fits this perpetrator framework perfectly. As an international, world-class rail and transportation company that generates over $40 billion in revenue each year, the SNCF can be perceived as strong. As mindless machines that do as instructed, trains are easily abstractable and represent the dehumanization of modernity. Thirdly, the SNCF represents the nature of the harm. Raul Hilberg (Reference Hilberg1993) argued that while many organizations contributed the destruction of Jews in Europe, the railroads were “indispensable at its core” (p. 40). Trains remain the prominent symbol of the Holocaust (Marrus Reference Marrus, Bankier and Michman2010). We see this today in the thousands of Holocaust-related books, films, museums, commemorative sites, and fictional stories in which trains figure prominently. Survivors interviewed for a new Holocaust Museum in South Africa voted almost unanimously for trains to stand as the symbol.
The last attribute of ideal perpetrators is that of being pursued by a justice hero. With so much competition for public attention and so many participants in mass atrocity, keeping any singular villain in the public eye for a sustained period requires someone or some group to dedicate their time and talents to the cause. Beate and Serge Klarsfeld did this kind of work in post-war Germany and France, making visible again and again the still unaccounted-for Nazi perpetrators.Footnote 7 In the SNCF conflict, New York lawyer Harriet Tamen served in this role. She worked first for two decades pro bono to pressure the SNCF to settle with survivors. She kept the SNCF in the press and galvanized support. These champion opponents can also be considered justice heroes (as I will discuss in Section 2.3.3) for their role in identifying and condemning perpetrators.
With everyone cast in their siloed roles, legal and legislative forums that promised an open space for deliberation operated more like a chessboard. The “ideal victim” moves like the Queen, able to say anything. The ideal perpetrator, the King, with the most limited, short-range discursive mobility. The Maryland State Senate checkmated the SNCF. At the hearing, a room of sympathetic delegates, lawyers, lobbyists and victims pummeled the executives present. The SNCF’s head of Corporate Social Responsibility, Bernard Emsellem, handed a piece of paper to SNCF America CEO Alain Leray, with “Nazis?” scribbled as a question.Footnote 8 The note expressed his confusion about why the legislators treated the SNCF like a living Nazi organization. The Maryland legislators set the rules of the game, allowing those attacking the company to speak at length and repeatedly interrupting the company’s responses. This left the SNCF in a frozen or fixed position (Greiff Reference Greiff2017).
When the company tried to improve its image by speaking about its heroism and its victimhood, the words were rejected by survivors and others. These defenses made the company seem as though it was resorting to moral equivalencies; the loss of rolling stock to the loss of life. Or, that the scales of justice can be balanced by the heroic efforts of a few brave railway workers. The narrative architecture of the event kept the SNCF frozen. The SNCF found itself in a “double bind,” damned if it acted, damned if it didn’t (Sluzki et al. Reference Sluzki, Ransom and Bateson1976). If the company refused to acknowledge its role in the Holocaust it was seen as a heartless liar. When it spoke of this history, some condemned the company for only responding to secure contracts.
Those Holocaust survivors spoke on both sides. One wore a sign around her neck with her father’s convoy number. One Auschwitz survivor spoke with a heavy accent for over twenty-minutes; few understood much of what he said. The survivor who spoke in defense of the SNCF found himself confronted with another survivor after the proceedings. “How dare you!” she said.
Again, to clarify, I am not saying that the company had no obligation to do more. My concern is that this forum provided a very limited space in which to have this discussion. Instead of working together to address the needs created by perpetrators now dead, the whole drama deepened distrust on both sides.
2.3.3 Ideal Heroes
Social conceptions also create our heroes. Sometimes heroes locate and elevate their stories, at other times they strategically narrate their activities for political purposes. When states decide to intervene in heroic narratives, they highlight its preferred actors. Hero stories easily become forms of state propaganda. In the case of mass violence, we see three types of heroes; superheroes and daily heroes are active during the events and justice heroes emerge in the aftermath. Superheroes have “super” powers in the sense of having access to resources well beyond the average person. Swedish diplomat Raoul Gustaf Wallenberg exemplified such a person: Wallenberg saved thousands of Jews by issuing protective passports while serving as a Swedish envoy in Budapest. Owner of munitions factories, Oskar Schindler, is another example. Exploiting his unusually wide network of connections in the business world and the Nazi regime, he was able to hide over a thousand Jews during their persecution.
Superheroes can also be strategically constructed. During World War II, less than 1% of the SNCF’s nearly half a million employees worked with the Resistance, though the company retained the title of unquestioned war hero for five decades. How? After a painful and humiliating occupation, the post-war French government found the SNCF to be a place to locate French pride. A number of brave SNCF workers derailed the trains headed toward D-Day filled with German armaments, helping allies secure their position. Even though deportation trains had continued to depart just two weeks previously, on August 26, 1944, the Conseil national de la Résistance, a resistance organization, congratulated then-SNCF President Pierre Eugène Fournier for the company’s acts of resistance during the war. The same year, the SNCF funded a film about its role in the Resistance. The SNCF also controlled the screenplay and the editing. Rene Clément’s resulting 1946 film La Bataille du Rail secured the SNCF’s place in the national psyche as a wartime hero. In the 1950s, the SNCF won France’s highest medal of honor for its role in the Resistance. In the 1950s, the SNCF commissioned further studies about acts of heroism within the company. Each story contributed to the corporate legend further submerging the company’s role in the Holocaust. The stories of SNCF resistance submerged the fact that these brave SNCF workers worked in opposition to the SNCF executive team, which reported saboteurs to the German occupier. Yes, a number of individuals engaged in heroic acts, but it is a flagrant distortion to label the SNCF, as a corporate entity, heroic.
The SNCF employees who engaged in resistance can be categorized as daily heroes. Daily heroes (1) are not personally targeted by the regime, (2) have everything to lose, and (3) use props or tools available in daily life to act on their moral convictions. Daily heroes include the SNCF employees in Lille, France, who convinced deportees to entrust their children to them (Célerse Reference Célerse2016). Other employees slowed trains, helped deportees hide, or refused to disclose their location. Beyond the SNCF, we have Cecile Rol-Tanguy who used her children’s strollers to transport various materials for the French Resistance, including explosives. Then there’s Georges Loinger, who taught children how to sprint and then set up soccer games at the French–Swiss border. Loinger would then throw the ball over the border and tell them to chase the ball and keep going until they reached safe territory. In another intervention, Loinger dressed children up as mourners and took them to a cemetery on the border, from where they could make a ready escape. Loinger saved over 350 children.
The creativity and bravery of such daily heroes challenge us all to do more. Perhaps this speaks to the popular preference for superheroes. The ordinariness of daily heroes, by contrast, serves as a reminder that everyone could be extraordinary, but most of the time we choose not to be. This holds up a mirror too closely and is especially uncomfortable for those who did nothing or who were complicit. A Holocaust survivor and renowned therapist, Dr. Edith Eva Eger tells us that even in the most horrible of circumstances there is always choice (Eger and Weigand Reference Eger and Weigand2017).
Justice heroes, the third category, emerge in the aftermath of mass atrocity to ensure accountability and other forms of atonement. Ben Ferencz, the young attorney who tried the accused at Nuremberg, counts as one of these heroes. Justice heroes leverage the judicial system in its various forms to advance their efforts. They may work as lawyers, legislators, or advocates, or support the efforts of these individuals.
As noted previously, Serge and Beate Klarsfled served as justice heroes in France for their remarkable efforts to bring unaccounted-for collaborators to trial. Justice heroes do not always follow a clear path and can end up influencing conflicts in surprising ways. In the early 1990s, Serge Klarsfeld condemned the SNCF and demanded accountability. After more research and after the SNCF contributed to his organization supporting Jewish orphans, he absolved them and provided legal services to the SNCF when they faced Holocaust-related lawsuits. During an interview, French lawyer Corrine Herskovitch, who led some of the legal cases against the SNCF on behalf of numerous survivor clients, reflected on Klarsfeld’s complex role.Footnote 9 She said Klarsfeld fought any effort that appeared to make Jews rich from the Holocaust, even when those efforts included returning stolen assets housed in banks. Even today, Klarsfeld more or less determines what Jews receive and how the Holocaust is storied. Herskovitch expressed her admiration for Klarsfeld and her simultaneous concern for how he keeps historians and lawyers “caged.” In sum, justice heroes affect how conflicts are understood and addressed. They generate the power behind claims, but also frame how those claims are understood and processed.
The SNCF conflict had other justice heroes. New York-based lawyer Harriet Tamen exerted tremendous influence on how the US public perceived the conflict. Other legal teams supported her work. At the conflict’s climax, US Ambassador Stuart Eizenstat and French Ambassador Patrizianna Sparacino-Thiellay negotiated and signed the $60 million settlement covering those not compensated by other programs. Because both countries had an interest in seeing the SNCF controversies subside, the agreement was framed in terms palatable to both countries. This made significant compensation possible, but left survivors out of the conversation and foreclosed future conversations about the SNCF’s accountability. Before receiving compensation, for example, survivors had to sign documents saying they would not pursue any legal claims against the company. While not unusual in settlements, such agreements can assert hegemonic control over the past. What if new information surfaces? What if survivors desire non-monetary compensation? The justice heroes, buoyed by the predominance of legalism, can frame past atrocities in ways that foreclose deeper, more reflective processes. When we sort everyone into idealized categories without making room for the contradictions and we mask the narrative destruction at the heart of communities and individual lives, this masking can create further silences, asking those who witnessed to further repress what they saw.
2.4 Danger of Idealized Roles
When deep narrative structure is broken, the journey toward the past that lies before us is marginalized, truncated. We lose more than just the thoughts of a few old people. We lose our bearings.
War destroys both narrative and physical architectures. Those surviving persecution live out their lives as (and with) different people, pursue different careers, and find different partners than they would have in the absence of violence. Sophie, whose parents were murdered when she was five years old, told me that her birth certificate lists a first name she has never heard. “Who is that person?” we wondered together.Footnote 10 When this narrative rupture occurs, narrative repair must occur alongside physical repair. These post-violence narrative structures, however, prove far harder to repair than buildings or railroad tracks. Sophie divorced herself from that mysterious other person and from the nuclear family that felt like a group of strangers. She married a good man and feels she has lived a wonderful life. Left behind, however, are the two brothers who tried to connect her with the world destroyed, the unlived life. To this day, eight decades after the events, she continues to resist their attempts. She also resents when her children try to make these kinds of connections. Sophie does not fit the ideal type for victim or even survivor. She is resentful of her brothers and disinterested in the Holocaust. She feels the SNCF had no choice. She is not alone in her views.
Few scholars or journalists report the stories of these very real individuals who do not share lessons learned or pursue justice the way many expect. Formula stories and idealizations offer clarity in chaotic times. Those wielding them do not consciously delete the Sophies of the world. But because she opts out of the post-war conversation, she is just not very useful for the justice pursuit and she will not offer inspirational words of wisdom to help others with their own struggles. We need to make room for these survivors/victims too. Otherwise we misunderstand the needs violence creates and perpetuate the false assumption that going through horrific experiences automatically makes one a wiser, kinder person. War breaks people, in ways large and small. They reemerge as someone else, and these lives may have much beauty. But from my many conversations with those who lived, survivorship seems the harder path.
Binary framings can also promote cycles of revenge, delegitimize the speech of groups who may not fit prescribed roles, encourage self-fulling prophecies, and obscure culpable actors. When ideal victims cannot be found, the justice story requires at the very least, “concrete victims” (Murphy Reference Murphy2017, 26). This narrow focus obscures many others victimized by violence.
The same goes for perpetrators. The perpetrator identity, once assigned, becomes difficult to overcome (Klapp Reference Klapp1954). This masks others, whose responsibility for violence does not fit accepted story lines and can further ignite justifiable feelings of revenge that perpetuate shaming cycles.Footnote 11 Such labeling also silences perpetrators. Scarry (Reference Scarry1987) expressed concern that their perspectives must be voiced, or they lead to latent, potentially violent conflicts. Accountability matters; we just want to pursue this accountability fully and in a way that does not lead back into violence.
Unfortunately, our justice system provides few pathways to reintegration. We ostracize and isolate, feeding into violence and social deviance. Furthermore, socially prescribed roles exert tremendous force on our behavior (Bruner Reference Bruner1990). Lois Presser calls this acting “for the sake of the story” (Reference Presser2018, 13). Knowing this, we would be wise to consider how we treat those who enacted harm.
Idealization of roles has other costs. Obsession with past, deceased perpetrators distracts us from the challenges of our time. Many of the survivors with whom I had spoken urged me to turn my attention to contemporary problems. What about those harmed today? I too noticed that Maryland legislators seemed curiously uninterested in vetting all companies bidding for state contracts to ensure good business practices. I asked Maryland delegate Sandy Rosenberg, who sponsored the original bill targeting the SNCF, why the Maryland legislator did not draft legislation that would vet the human rights records of all companies bidding for business, instead of just the SNCF. Rosenberg said to me, “Well, that’s what the people came to me about.”Footnote 12 This highlights the important role we can all play in our responses to harm. Had more Maryland residents urged legislators to make human rights standards critical throughout the state, they may have complied. Instead, the bill died, and no standards were upheld.
Several Holocaust survivors pointed out another challenge of the construction of ideal victims: States using their suffering to defend policy. Daniel, an Auschwitz survivor, for example, expressed mixed feelings about Israel, “On the one hand, I have to support Israel, on the other it’s very painful to see Jews hurting other people.”Footnote 13 Liliane Marton, whose parents were murdered, interrupted our dinner interview at her home to turn on the television news: “I just want to see if the Palestinian and Syrian children are doing okay.”Footnote 14 Others too related more to the targeted Palestinians than to the state of Israel.
Using idealized victims to support policy occurs in many other contexts. I saw this dynamic emerge again when working with young adults whose parents were killed in the World Trade Center on 9/11. One told me that she says to those discriminating against Muslims, “Stop using my pain to justify your hatred.” Those who lost parents in the attacks are no longer young children, they are college-aged adults who can now speak for themselves. Some have become a voice for peace, making it harder for the state to use their victimization to justify its agenda.
The narrative dynamics of the justice story can also distract us from equally dangerous, albeit less visible, forms of participation in massive human rights violations. Hannah Arendt pointed to bureaucratic rule as a perpetrator of the worst sort because no one accepted responsibility (Minow Reference Minow, Brooks and Gerwitz1996). Arendt called these people “desk murderers” (Schreibtischtäter). SNCF executives can best be understood this way whenever they reported to the Germans their own workers engaged in subversive activities, when they did not transfer Jewish SNCF employees to the Free Zone, and when they wrote letters to the Germans demanding payment but appeared to never write any letters resisting the deportation trains.
The SNCF was primed to be a site of this kind of bureaucratic participation. To start, the SNCF’s wartime president Pierre Eugène Fournier was a technocrat rather than an engineer. The complex network of trains and rolling stock required adherence to bureaucracy to run smoothly. In these environments, people focus on the details of the job versus the meaning (Kelman Reference Kelman1973). This was very much the case for the SNCF railway workers who prioritized duty to the railways over country (Broch Reference Broch2016). Under these conditions, people can also keep themselves intentionally uninformed (Bandura Reference Bandura and Reich1999). Contexts that numb our ethnical sensibilities ought to be worrisome. Corporate decisions that poison the planet or use forced labor far away, for example, are not always visible to employees. Nevertheless, their careers and our consumer purchasing decisions contribute to the harm. Idealizations of evildoers in a boardroom (while they sometimes exist) obscure this kind of daily participation. Much of mass violence is far more mundane.
2.5 Toward Interdependence
What alternatives exist to these binary constructions? While victims and perpetrators remain inextricably linked by violence, we can resist amplifying one role in proportion to the other. For example, the victimized need not demonstrate angelic purity in order to receive compensation or services. The perpetrator need not be constructed as inhuman in order to be held accountable.
Uncoupling the proportional pairs (ideal victims and ideal perpetrators) also interrupts how we think about punishment. Murphy sees retributive justice as following the close pairing of victims and perpetrators, in which, “the amount of suffering should be proportional to the wrong committed” (Reference Murphy2017, 8). How can harm possibly be quantified and then equally imposed? What madness that invites! Responding to irreparable harm with irreparable punishment leaves everyone broken. Interrupting the relations between these roles gives us room to identify and respond to the harm, wherever it lies. Mohamed (Reference Mohamed2015) reminds us that even those who wielded the harm suffer the effects of their violence. We see this trauma in Vietnam War veterans: First victims of the draft, many young men went on to perpetrate great harm against the Vietnamese. In the aftermath, many died by suicide or turned to alcohol while others suffered other forms of psychological damage resulting from the violence they enacted. Today, soldier trauma is more widely understood, treated, and increasingly destigmatized in the West. We are slower to extend this new awareness to our understanding of Nazis, Hutus, Serbians, former Khmer Rouge, and others who similarly found themselves drawn into and traumatized by violence. The psyche responds to the violence regardless of the political justifications or lack thereof. Excluding perpetrators from treatment satisfies feelings of revenge at a cost: We misunderstand mass violence and thwart the move toward positive peace.
Disrupting the proportional relationship between victims and perpetrators facilitates the reflective judgment that facilitates moral learning (Lara Reference Lara2007). Understanding the full scope and nature of evil, she says, requires visiting the past in various ways. Embracing versus flattening complexities enriches this exploration and learning. In these spaces of reflective judgment, more productive and widespread forms of accountability can emerge.
After World War II, most of those who participated in harm went back to work and daily life. Engaging those who enacted harm in restoration activities provides an alternative to either punishing them or expunging their culpability. In restorative justice, those who enacted the harm respond to the needs their participation created. Murder someone? Meet the financial needs of the family. Blow up a town square? Rebuild it. Fund militias to protect your mines? With your own hands, help rebuild the schools and community infrastructure. The billions that fund carceral compounds can be redirected to support these types of efforts. This approach to justice facilitates reintegration. They create new identities, or additional identities, as contributors.
Yes, a solid argument can be made to incarcerate charismatic individuals who are likely to galvanize support for their ideologies and call people to arms yet again. Yet more participated in the violence than can be held accountable by incarceration and the need created by the harm will take many hands. Can more be done with the tens of thousands of those caught up in the insanity of their times? Our current approach to post-atrocity justice impedes their engagement with the myriad of problems the violence created. Responding directly to harm they inflicted offers individuals a deeper opportunity to reflect on their actions and to walk a path back home. The Fambol Tok organization, for example, works in Sierra Leone to facilitate apologies in villages where local members had become killers during the war and now wish to return home. These apologies contribute to integration and create possibilities for direct action. Restorative approaches have tremendous untapped potential in the contexts of mass violence, even when engaging corporations.
In the case of the SNCF, contemporary executives now attend, as well as fund, commemorative events. Seeing contemporary executives standing side-by-side with the harmed models a pathway to healing rarely seen in other contexts. This is good for business and good moral work: Such goals are not always incongruent. Through these efforts, they model for other corporations some of the ways to participate in restoration and historical integrity, even decades after the violent events.
Engaging all culpable parties in the long-term work in the aftermath of violence moves us away from discursively idealized constructions and toward what Murphy (Reference Murphy2017) calls “relational transformation,” focused on treating others with dignity, inspiring reciprocity, and promoting freedom to support larger societal transformation. Recognition of the fact that victims and perpetrators frequently have overlapping roles further facilitates this shift. David Gray points out how overlapping roles stabilize healthy societies, counterbalancing the weight of each group. He offers the example, “Some Democrats are Presbyterians; some Presbyterians are investment bankers; some investment bankers are Republicans; and so forth” (Reference Gray2010, 83). These overlaps feel less offensive in peacetime than they do in the aftermath of violence, during which pointing to overlaps is often targeted as apologist behavior. We can accept a democratic investment more easily. Understanding overlapping roles and acknowledging that socio-political contexts gave rise to the violence supports resilience.Footnote 15
2.6 Survivors Embrace Complexity
Transitional justice-supported societal transformation must set about “creating or reconstituting the network of overlapping identities reflective of a dynamically stable society” (Gray Reference Gray2010, 56). Ironically, survivors may articulate this vision better than those entering the aftermath to care for them. Holocaust survivors expressed greater comfort with overlapping roles than the many more “educated” individuals engaging in legal and legislative battles involving the SNCF. True, the media focused on those who understandably demanded that the SNCF pay for the transport of their families during the Holocaust, but of the ninety survivors I interviewed (all individuals who escaped persecution in France), less than 20 percent took a hardline position on the conflict. André was born Adolph but changed his name to distance himself from the Nazi regime that deported his father from France and subsequently murdered him at Auschwitz. His mother barely survived persecution and was ill much of her post-war life. After the war, they had no apartment, no money, and no work. About post-war justice André said, “You cannot want everything. You have to understand the time period,” he explained. “People were selling people all the time; Jews, communists, Resistants, others. People had very little money. It was a complicated time, but there were a lot of justes [good people].”Footnote 16 Numerous survivors living in France made similar arguments.
Julius also appreciates some of these complexities, namely the difficulty and complexity of the resistance. An 89-year-old Bay Area resident at the time of our interview, Julius’ parents were carried off by SNCF drivers, “so was my little brother, six-years-old, and my little sister, eleven-years-old.” Despite Julius’ ineffable losses, his description of the SNCF’s position shows an appreciation of complexity and subtlety.
It was all of France that helped, including the train company. I very much doubted anything would come out of [the SNCF lawsuits]. And nothing did … You can dream that a driver could have said “I will not drive the train” but he would have been shot. If I had time, I could come up with several things they could have done but they didn’t. They just did their jobs. The trains ran very nicely. They did not think what the train was transporting. It was their job, you know, 8–5. They could have done a few things – because at the end 1944–1945 the resistance started waking up a bit. There was no resistance in France; 85 percent was collaborating if not actively – passively. If they thought maybe Americans would win, they switched. At the end of the war, at the liberation, 85 percent was in the Resistance. They blew up military trains – they could have done the same thing – that was the story with the SNCF and the deportations. They could have blown up the railroad tracks and the Americans could have bombed Auschwitz … Footnote 17
Julius’ statement holds the French and American governments accountable, along with the SNCF and others.
In their homes, perhaps, many embraced complexities, but when the act of talking about the war challenged their professional identities or ambitions, the binaries returned. Here we see the difference between the “kitchen table” conversations and the microphone introduced in the preface of this book. Offering much more complexity when we met in informal environments, at official events people moved into binaries. For example, I attended the Maryland Senate Hearing on the question of the SNCF’s obligation to compensate local survivors before bidding for state contracts. Seated outside the event, waiting for the hearing to begin, the man seated next to me on the red plush bench asked casually,
I tried to correct him, but it was too late – he had already cast me in a role. Any response other than “I’m fighting the SNCF” was perceived as coming from an apologist or against the survivors. He was a representative of Holocaust survivors for the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) and, though he admitted to knowing little about the SNCF’s role in the war, its efforts to make amends, or what the survivors thought, he felt assured of his position.
I sometimes had more subtle conversations with SNCF executives, survivors, and lawyers. Even the most ardent advocates occasionally softened their hardline when given the space. Harriet Tamen, the lead justice hero bringing the SNCF to its proverbial knees, said during an interview, “Let’s be honest, it’s not like they had a choice.”Footnote 18 By this she meant that the SNCF could not easily resist the Germans during the war.
Binary constructions do the dangerous work of shutting off our vigilance. I had been through the museum many times, but survivor Harry Markowicz wanted to take me on a private tour so that he could share his personal memories in context. Midway through the second floor, he teared up, turned to me, and said “You know, I really think this could have happened anywhere.” He went on, “The conditions were right in Germany, but it could happen in the United States.”
2.7 Conclusion
Harry died while I was working on this chapter. So too did Jacqueline, Stanley, Ester, and Giacomo. Daniel’s daughter recently called to tell me that he and his brother will likely pass any day. They are already beyond my reach, unable to communicate on the phone. Each year fewer survivors attend commemorative events. Those remaining continue to share warnings about resurgent fascism. The SNCF carries on, facing tremendous business challenges of today without quite being free from integrating the overlapping wartime roles of hero, victim, and perpetrator. While incomplete, their efforts exceed those of many complicit companies that ignore, obscure, or strategically distort histories.
The fire behind the SNCF conflict may have cooled with the treaty signing. The SNCF now offers a more complex story of its wartime role. Yet, these idealized roles continue to drive justice discourse around the world, directing responses to violence. Inhuman depictions of the victimized and victimizer eventually become like rusty hinges, too stiff to allow the flexibility needed to respond to the messiness of moral collapse. Moving away from static roles facilitates more complete responses to harm as well as greater inquiry into structural violence, historical legacies, and the effects of transgenerational trauma. Rather than direct all collective disdain toward one or several evildoers, we can examine the variety of participants.
A transformative approach to justice depends upon our ability to discuss and respond to collective accountability. Criminal courts struggle with how notions of collective responsibility intersect with an individual’s mens rea (Gray Reference Gray2010). Restorative social processes need not be hampered by such legal limitations. John Paul Lederach says that a transformative orientation requires that we develop our moral imagination, an imagination that “refuses to frame life’s challenges, problems, and issues as dualistic polarities” (Reference Lederach2010, 62).
Understanding cultural proclivities toward totalitarianism requires understanding how totalitarian regimes appeal to the average person, rather than the more unique psyches of charismatic authoritarian leaders (Jaspers Reference Jaspers2009). When narrative depictions of mass violence focus attention on the most egregious offenders, the most sympathetic victims, and the most astonishing heroes, we lose our way. The story that soothes us, entraps us. In its extreme form, this narrative genre serves as a kind of “therapeutic history” in which we tell stories about ourselves that make us feel good while obscuring the damage caused by past actions (Niezen Reference Niezen2009, ch. 7).
Just as no country is safe from sliding back, any country with a retributive justice system that thrives on idealized characters distracts us from accountable parties hiding in the shadows and from the desk murders occurring now. Arendt (Reference Arendt2006) warned us not to romanticize the courtroom forum, which she said resembled a play. Legal processes, like public narratives, thrive on simplicity, succeeding only when they can deny the complexity of the real world (Loseke Reference Loseke2003). So long as we believe we can simply remove and ostracize those who do harm, we will perpetuate cycles of violence. Instead, Lederach challenges us to imagine a future “that includes our enemies” (Reference Lederach2010, 5). Building resilience requires accepting the possibility that atrocities can happen anywhere and involve regular people, like ourselves, in ways we shudder to imagine.
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