Don't Know Why

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Genius... is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one. He is not a natural star, not an incandescent personality like Jack Nicholson, but he makes luminous the problems of being an ordinary man in an extraordinary situation. One other factor sharply distinguished Łomazy from Józefów and may well have been yet another kind of psychological “relief” for the men—namely, this time they did not bear the “burden of choice” that Trapp had offered them so starkly on the occasion of the first massacre. The battalion had orders to kill Jews, but each individual did not. I was not a messiah, but an ordinary man who had become a leader because of extraordinary circumstances. These men would not seem to have been a very promising group from which to recruit mass murderers on behalf of the Nazi vision of a racial utopia free of Jews. What ordinary men are directly aware of and what they try to do are bounded by the private orbits in which they live; their visions and their powers are limited. In this sense, brutalization was not the cause but the effect of these men’s behavior.
[…] By virtue of their age, of course, all went through their formative period in the pre-Nazi era. To break ranks and step out, to adopt overtly nonconformist behavior, was simply beyond most of the men. The battalion had orders to kill Jews, but each individual did not. I idolize Gene Hackman. They ate little but drank heavily. Very few were economically independent. Another policeman—more aware of what truly required courage—said quite simply, “I was cowardly.”. From their stories I could gather that they had just finished a shooting action. Brian and I have ups and downs like every marriage does.

Sergeant Steinmetz of Third Platoon once again gave his men the opportunity to report if they did not feel up to it. Ordinary Men Quotes Next. It has always been a wonder to me where my conversational power has gone: at the present time, I cannot impress the most ordinary men. But the “Jew hunt” was different. No chance to step out was given to those who did not feel up to shooting; no one systematically excused those who were visibly too shaken to continue. I like the tradition of ordinary men in extraordinary circumstances and how they react to events which force them to be heroic in a way that is not in their natures. But when the men of First Company were summoned to the marketplace, instructed in giving a “neck shot,” and sent to the woods to kill Jews, some of them tried to make up for the opportunity they had missed earlier. Only a dozen men had instinctively seized the moment to step out, turn in their rifles, and thus excuse themselves from the subsequent killing. It is true that going out on to the street implies the risk of accidents happening, as they would to any ordinary man or woman. These were men who had known political standards and moral norms other than those of the Nazis. The Jews of Międzyrzec did not march “like sheep to the slaughter.” They were driven with an almost unimaginable ferocity and brutality that left a singular imprint even on the memories of the increasingly numbed and callous participants from Reserve Police Battalion 101. Genius always presupposes some disorder in the machine. A murderer is regarded by the conventional world as something almost monstrous, but a murderer to himself is only an ordinary man. At the age of 50, no one expected that this was going to be the guy who would become, at least in my interpretation, one of the two most important presidents of the 20th century. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man." Once the killing began, however, the men became increasingly brutalized. Yet 80 to 90 percent of the men proceeded to kill, though almost all of them—at least initially—were horrified and disgusted by what they were doing. Teachers and parents! They had experienced neither social nor geographic mobility. Major Trapp appealed to this generalized notion of the Jews as part of the enemy in his early-morning speech. Ordinary men are given the authority of the priesthood. Therefore, those who shot did not have to live with the clear awareness that what they had done had been avoidable. Struggling with distance learning? Thus, wartime brutalization through prior combat was not an immediate experience directly influencing the policemen’s behavior at Józefów. At Łomazy following orders reinforced the natural tendency to conform to the behavior of one’s comrades. They're like having in-class notes for every discussion!”, “This is absolutely THE best teacher resource I have ever purchased. By using our site, you acknowledge that you have read and understand our. Many of the German occupiers in Poland may have witnessed or participated in ghetto roundups on several occasions—in a lifetime, a few brief moments that could be easily repressed. Detailed explanations, analysis, and citation info for every important quote on LitCharts. Only a minority of nonconformists managed to preserve a beleaguered sphere of moral autonomy that emboldened them to employ patterns of behavior and stratagems of evasion that kept them from becoming killers at all.

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