"Anyone who helps other's children is a hero always."
And therein lies the tale of the time and hurt figuring that out cost me---but I am left happy to pay again. I'm guessing that people who set out to be teachers (as I did) are, consciously or not, signing up for a heroic quest.
Looking at ignorance as the enemy, the quest is easier to see and there appears to be less peril in the praxis. But when you show us this child caught up in the Nazi machine, peril is dialed up to a level off the charts.
"If we seek the truth," I ask my students, "can a lie be morally correct behavior?"
Of course it can. A squad of SS troopers is at your door asking, "Have you seen any Jews?"
"An old woman gave us shelter
kept us hidden in the garret
and then the soldiers came.
She died without a whisper..."
I remember the poem, "The Partisan," and then you show me a German child--scion of the Master Race--who is also plainly in need of help. I think you have just illustrated an aspect of governments we call "totalitarian." Every child needs help. The consequences of taking a wrong step are life-changing.
Social psychologist Stanley Milgram did a famous study of obedience that turned into a series of studies. Most of us have read something about them. The subject is told he or she is a proctor in a study of learning and the job is to administer an electric shock when a wrong answer is offered by a "student" (who is actually a confederate).
The apparent cost of a wrong answer keeps rising, from a mildly unpleasant zap (that the "teacher" is allowed to experience at the beginning to show how harmless it is) to a shock that is presented as life-threatening. Sometimes the "student" is rendered unconscious.
Milgram proved that alarming numbers of ordinary people would follow an order to do physical harm to another to avoid the fairly trivial harm of disrupting the "learning experiment."
One of many unintended consequences of the Milgram experiments is the human subjects committee at every research university that must bless every experiment to root out issues like subjects forced without warning to get in touch with their inner Nazi.
Did you see the ethical issue coming?
I did not, and even when it was revealed, my first response was to think that there is value in learning about that side of my personality, particularly if I don't believe it exists.
Self-knowledge is sometimes hard to acquire and always hard to use constructively. In my case, thinking I knew myself well without having experienced dramatic shocks, fast-forward fifty years.
I have just been diagnosed with cancer and I've not written my story that I've intended to write for all of my adult life. After I won a race with my own mortality to get it done, it published last June and disappeared into the dead zone created by COVID 19, the dead zone created when promoting books by usual means became impossible.
Maybe it deserved to disappear. The title reveals my goal: "Lighting the Fire: A Cherokee Journey from Dropout to Professor." It's my life and I thought I was the hero.
I was not. I'm now ashamed that I was unable to see how many people picked me up and carried me over what appeared to be impossible barriers. No, I was not the hero of my own story, but I was in the middle of writing it when an epiphany fractured the original narrative and left me wondering if it was possible to squeeze literary value out of two stories with ragged edges pushed together of necessity to illustrate the truth :
"Anyone who helps other's children is a hero...........always."
