The “Tower of Faces” is an exhibit in the U.S. Holocaust Museum.
Perhaps you have seen this powerful installation?
The tower is intimate, a small room with four walls that extend up three-stories. The walls are lined with 1,500 framed photographs of residents from the town of Eishyshok, Lithuania. The pictures are of families, friends, and neighbors, posing at dinner parties, swimming holes, weddings, holidays, reunions, and just generally enjoying what appears to be regular and comfortable lives. All of the photos were taken in the few months and years preceding the September date in 1941 when Nazi mobile killing units arrived to murder the 3,500 residents. Only 29 survived, including Yaffa Eliach who later created this exhibit with the photos she and other survivors collected. Read more here.
Eliach was motivated to create this exhibit to show that her community was made up of humans who celebrated holidays, went skiing, and picked flowers. She wanted to remember their lives, not their deaths. They were just regular people.
The exhibit invites viewers to imagine themselves as residents of this town. And imagine that they, too, could become exterminated under just the right socio-historical conditions.
The first time I saw this exhibit I had taken my leadership communication class to the Holocaust Museum. I wanted them to face what “leadership” without inclusive values looks like. Before this trip, too often my students would wonder aloud, “Was Hitler a great leader?” I arranged this trip to preemptively address that kind of thinking. The museum provides the lesson of why contemporary leadership theorists include “value-based” as part of the definition of leadership. So, no, Hitler was NOT a great leader, nor was he leader at all.
To some extent I expected the Tower of Faces, if not explicitly then in spirit. Visually the tower makes the point that I try to make about leadership in my class. Hitler did not strive to lead these people; he denied their humanity. Here in the tower is the evidence that his victims were human.
What I did not expect, as we continued the tour, was a cobbling in my mind of another tower.
My students and I entered the museum under the impression that Hitler threatened Nazi leaders, SS, killing squads, and death camp workers into their work – that they could not refuse orders to kill lest they be killed. But this wasn’t true.
Historian Doris Bergen wrote “Germans were not forced to be killers. Those who refused to participate were given other assignments or transferred. To this day no one has found an example of a German who was executed for refusing to take part in the killing of Jews or other civilians. Defense attorneys of people accused of war crimes have looked hard for such a case because it would support the claim that their clients had no choice. The Nazi system, however, did not work that way. There were enough willing perpetrators so that coercive force could be reserved for those deemed enemies.”
“Enough willing perpetrators…”
Indeed. Spread throughout the museum were photos of such perpetrators – fresh-faced young SS officers patrolling streets, professional portraits of doctors who participated in euthanasia programs of the disabled, posed groupings of killing squad members, and drunken death camp workers. Some may have felt professional pressure, but none feared for their own lives.
The perpetrators already held prejudices – against Jews, disabled people, LGBT folks, Catholics, Jehovah’s Witnesses, feminists, and so on – that the Nazis exploited with the Holocaust. When some humans are already viewed as less valuable as neighbors, employees, romantic partners, and students – when even touching them is considered taboo — why would torturing and killing them be immoral?
What’s to think about?
Rudolf Höss, a former Auschwitz commander said this at his Nuremberg trial: “Don’t you see, we SS men were not supposed to think about these things; it never even occurred to us. … We were all so trained to obey orders without even thinking that the thought of disobeying an order would simply never have occurred to anybody, and somebody else would have done just as well if I hadn’t. … I really never gave much thought to whether it was wrong. It just seemed a necessity.”
It’s easy to imagine Rudolf, the SS, and the other perpetrators as evil caricatures – figures with no humanity as they denied others theirs.
But here’s the uncomfortable truth that settled into me on that day. There’s another tower.
The perpetrators were humans, too. Regular people, who before the Holocaust, also had “regular” lives. Somewhere there are pictures of them in family portraits, posing with relatives at a studio, grayscale pictures from the 1930s and 1940s. I have pictures like these in boxes in my attic – pictures with family members with features similar to mine, versions of me from an earlier time. Indeed, a quarter of my ancestors are German, though they arrived to the US four generations ago, in the mid-1800s. The people in the museum’s photographs look like me.
Perhaps it’s easier to imagine ourselves as potential victims, but it’s just as real to imagine ourselves as potential perpetrators. What makes me any better of a person than they were? How can I be so sure?
As horrifying as this thought is, the more I allow it in, the more empowered I feel. The fight to ensure that similar atrocities happen “never again” is a fight inside me. It’s inside each of us. And we are well positioned to do something about that.
Insightful. And inciteful.