In 1944, my grandmother was sent to a death camp in the Polish countryside. The name of that camp, Auschwitz, has now been branded into our collective memory as the physical and ethereal embodiment of human evil. Auschwitz is no longer just a place, but a representation of the human urge to discover how far down the abyss evil really goes. Her memories from that place — the murder of her sister, the death of her mother — have never left her to this day.
In my 22 years on this planet, I have heard many of her stories. Surprisingly, even though she is 92, I have not yet heard them all, and I suspect I never will, even if given 200 years with her. Sometimes, well into her retelling of a particular story, she will pause and remind me that there was a qualitative difference between the Wehrmacht, the German regular armed forces, and the Schutzstaffel, or SS, the outfit gleefully tasked with the extermination of the Jews.
This effort to distinguish had always puzzled me. My grandmother’s personality is not one built for nuance. It couldn’t be. Her life demanded certainty, action and bravery — qualities that rarely allow for careful discernment. And yet, in describing the greatest tragedies of her life, now she had time for shades of gray?
The strangeness had always confounded me until, like a puzzle, the piece I had been missing came in the form of one of her stories, told and retold, which I hadn’t given its due importance. It was this story, and this realization, that taught me something important about our capacity and responsibility as individuals to do good, and the immense power we have to change the world even with our slightest actions or a few kind words.
The story goes like this: When my grandmother was interned in Auschwitz, there was a guard who had always been abnormally kind to the prisoners. According to my grandmother, he was not a member of the SS but of the German army regulars, tasked with guarding the camp and the prisoners when they left the camp to perform slave labor outside its walls. She recounts a particular moment — one must remember this happened over 70 years ago — when he approached her, looked at her and said gently, “You remind me of my daughter.”
Seventy years later, my grandmother remembers this moment with clarity and emotion. I believe it was enough for my grandmother to consider, if even briefly, the idea that people were yet redeemable, despite their complicity in any amount of evil. That moment certainly wasn’t enough to compensate for the inhumanity, pain, suffering or mutilation, which had been inflicted upon her and millions of others, but it still resonates decades later.
Whether or not he deserved my grandmother’s accepting of his words for their softness and kindness instead of considering it an infinitesimal payment on a debt she was owed, for a moment there was a light lit in the middle of a raging tempest, and my grandmother — despite her pain and her loss — recognized herself and him as human beings, one undeniably guilty and the other tragically innocent. It is not necessary to exonerate him from his crimes, to acknowledge his complicity in a boundless evil. What is extraordinary is that singular moment could shine through the darkness that covered the world like a burial shroud and remain rooted in her mind — the same mind that remembers the starvation, the humiliation and the murder of her family.
This is the extraordinary power of a single moment of kindness, of a recognition of our shared humanity. It is a miraculous power that we all have. If a miracle is an event that goes against the natural order, an event that is distinctly improbable because of this quality, then what could be more miraculous? We have the capacity to practice these moments of kindness and to go against the natural order of inertia, of unfeeling, of uncaring. Never, never underestimate the power you have on other people and the impression you may make by a single kind word. They may tell it to their grandchildren almost a century later, and give them the sense that redemption is possible.
Aaron Bondar is a senior double-majoring in political science and economics.