Failing to Believe When It Matters Most
Leadership
The title of Jonathan Freedland’s recent book, The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke out of Auschwitz to Warn the World, holds out the promise of an uplifting ending. While its subject, Walter Rosenberg, did manage to escape from the Auschwitz extermination camp, what happened afterward serves as a cautionary tale of what happens when the truth is too terrible to believe.
Unable to escape to the West when the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia, Rosenberg was forced into almost two years of captivity where he saw thousands of Jews being marched off to gas chambers. When his new work detail came with certain privileges, he saw an unlikely, but possible, opportunity to escape. Walter, only in his late teens, felt the weight that he had to do something to stop the slaughter. His willingness to risk his life with an escape attempt was based on three assumptions:
- The outside world did not know about what was happening at Auschwitz.
- The Allied leadership and forces would act as soon as they had knowledge.
- Once Jews knew about what was happening at Auschwitz, they would offer a greater resistance, making it harder for the Nazis to operate the death camps so efficiently.
However, by the end of his life, all three of these assumptions would be brought into doubt.
Walter and another young man amazingly escaped and reached Jewish leaders back in Czechoslovakia. Their detailed report provided evidence of the mass killings and is credited with contributing to the saving of 200,000 Hungarian Jews who were next on the Nazi’s list to ship to Auschwitz. Unfortunately, Walter’s bravery had a more limited impact than he expected, and countless Holocaust victims failed to put up the resistance he was expecting.
One primary reason was a failure to believe something so evil was actually occurring. Freedland tells the story of a conversation between Walter and a Hungarian Jew who survived because he heeded Walter’s warning. The conversation happened forty years after the war as Walter continued to blame Jewish leaders for not doing more to circulate his report. The other man argued that it would not have made any difference. He observed that middle-aged and older people heard the information but refused to use it. Denial, or not believing the reports, became a natural way to escape reality.
Jan Karski, a Polish diplomat, had seen first-hand the concentration camps and traveled to America during the war to alert U.S. government officials. After spending about 20 minutes describing what he had seen to Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, the Justice replied, “I don’t believe you.” Another diplomat immediately defended Karski’s credibility. The judge responded, “I did not say he is lying. I said I don’t believe him. These are different things. My mind and heart are made in such a way that I cannot accept it.”
One French Jewish philosopher, Claude Lanzmann, when asked about the Holocaust responded, “I knew but I didn’t believe. And because I didn’t believe it, I didn’t know.”
Freedland summarized the failure of those who knew but didn’t respond to what Walter risked his life to share, “Only when information is combined with belief does it become knowledge. And only knowledge leads to action.”
The inability to accept the possibility of a worst-case scenario can result in a disastrous outcome. But so can the failure to accept the possibility of a best-case scenario. Belief is a powerful driver as well as a powerful filter for our actions. Are the most important actions we need to take limited by beliefs we are unwilling to embrace?