Would you let a Jew in your house? [Auschwitz hypothetical]

Great Debates
1

Please imagine that you are using your current sense of morality (i.e. don’t put yourself in the position of having what you believe was 1940s morality, if you get me).

Scenario 1:

It’s 1944. You live near Auschwitz and know what is going on there (at least to the extent they are systematically murdering Jews). Someone you know to be an escaped Jew begs you for help. Do you let them shelter in your house or report them to the authorities?

Scenario 2:

As above but you do not know what is going on there but have a decent idea.

Scenario 3:

As above but you only know about the general Nazi views on Jews.

**Scenarios 4,5,6: **

As above but you do not know that the escaped Jew is, in fact, a Jew.
And two more questions:

  1. Without peeking how do you think most posters will answer the above scenarios?
    and
  2. How do you believe they would actually act in these scenarios?

Final question for luck:

(not quite relevant to this)

I was going to color theme this post but decided against it. How would you feel about color coding in future?

2

[Modding]There’s no factual answer to this question, so I’m moving it to Great Debates. I’m also modifying the thread title to something more specific.[/modding]

To play along, I’m going to say the answer to all six is “yes” and I think just about everyone here will say the same.

3

In scenarios 4,5,6 by “not know that the escaped Jew is, in fact, a Jew” I mean there is a possibility that they are a Nazi agent attempting to identify collaborators.

4

Please, don’t colour-code things.

5

[QUOTE=Osakadelica]
Please imagine that you are using your current sense of morality (i.e. don’t put yourself in the position of having what you believe was 1940s morality, if you get me).
[/QUOTE]

Scenario 1:

I’d give them food, and some supplies and send them on their way.

Scenario 2:

The same

Scenario 3:

The same

**Scenarios 4,5,6: **

I might just refuse to help altogether.

And two more questions:

  1. Without peeking how do you think most posters will answer the above scenarios?

Hard to say. I believe that most would want to help, but probably be afraid to get involved in the first couple of scenarios. In the last few some will acquiesce no doubt.
2. How do you believe they would actually act in these scenarios?

See my above response.

Final question for luck:

(not quite relevant to this)

I was going to color theme this post but decided against it. How would you feel about color coding in future?
meh, if you like.

6

I honestly haven’t a clue what I would do. On the one hand, there’s this random stranger at my door, in dire peril. On the other hand, what may befall my family if I offer him shelter?

7

I married one, so you tell me.

8

Unlike everyone who ever met Richard Kimble on the original Fugitive, no I don’t think I’d risk my life/freedom and my families to help a total stranger.

9

[QUOTE=Osakadelica]

Scenario 1:
[…]Do you let them shelter in your house or report them to the authorities?
[/QUOTE]
Let them shelter. To do elsewise would as good as murder them, and I wouldn’t murder my fellow humans, even if it costs my own life.

Still shelter them - just a hint of that level of inhumanity is enough to hide someone from.

I’m assuming they tell me the specifics of what they’re escaping from, at least? Still shelter them, the general Nazi views are repellent enough to me.

Mmmm, tougher - they could be Gestapo, or similar, involved in a sting. But the risk to them if they are a Jew is too great, so it will still be the same as the first three.

I think they’ll mostly answer as I did, although I can see some turning down No. 6, maybe No. 5.

Unless he’s a very observant Jew, then I can see a lot of our immoral atheists letting him go to the ovens because every right-thinking person knows they hate the religious more than Nazis :wink: .

Generally like they say they would, although some may break down when the risk is too great - the last 3 scenarios, IMO. But it’s a big what-if, I only know how I’ve acted in the past when the chips are down. If you substitute “wanted ANC member” and “apartheid government” and “Robben Island” for “Jew”, “Nazi” and “Auschwitz”, this very scenario has played itself out in my own immediate family just 23 years ago, so I know what way I’d swing.

If it’s tasteful, it’s OK, I suppose, but I think most Dopers are literate enough not to need management tricks .

10

  1. I think that most people are going to say that they would shelter the fugative

  2. In reality, I think that most people would be too scared to actually do so, when to do so would likely put yourself and your family on the inside of the gas chamber.

I’ve no idea what I would do in such a circumstance.

11

I’d like to think I’d help a person genuinely in need under any circumstances, even in Nazi Germany, but with a wife and three kids to think of, I just don’t know. I hope I would be brave enough to lend assistance, at least, even if I didn’t throw myself wholeheartedly into sheltering an escaped concentration-camp inmate.

I suspect most other Dopers would answer the same, and I think they’d be truthful in saying so.

12

I would weigh the known risks, but tend towards helping out a person who needed it.

13

I’d just like to add that if I didn’t take the Jew in, my wife would make my life a living hell, AND take him in anyway, so the “think of your own family” objections didn’t even enter my head - I’m the selfish one in the family.

14

Scenario one: There is no one home. I packed up my family and fled from Germany as soon as I found out. (November 11, 1938 probably.)

Same for all the other scenarios. I have thought about this quite a bit. If I had no family, I would have probably been involved in some sort of clandestine resistance. By 1944, most likely I would be living in very secret fashion, or dead. If alive, I would put the man into whatever pipeline I knew about, station one of which would either kill him, or send him on.

I will only just barely collude with the twenty-first century US government, and haven’t always done that. Nazi Germany would have already started hunting me, long before 1944.

Tris

15

My family comes first. Under the Nazi regime, sheltering a jew is a one way ticket up the chimney for me and mine. He immediately goes on his way.

16

I don’t know what I’d do.

I’m in violent agreement with the “my family comes first” option. I would risk my life; I know my wife would say to risk her life for that same cause.

Our child, however, is another matter.

But – if our child sees us turn away someone under those circumstances, have we done him a true service? “For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world, and forfeit his soul?” Do I serve my child better by risking his life now to show him that some things are worth dying for?

I don’t know how I would act in the moment.

I can tell you that for utterly certain, if he’s not in the equation, we shelter.

17

What I’ve read, and I’ll see if I can find a cite for it, is that the Nazis wouldn’t just go after you. They’d go after your children or your parents. Makes it a more difficult choice. Would you sacrifice your child’s life to save another father’s son? It’s not an easy question, and I honestly don’t know what I’d do.

18

I don’t know what I’d do. I’d like to think I would help but I don’t know that I’d really have the personal courage, nor would I want to place my own wife and children at risk.

I think I’d be likely to offer food, but not report them. If I didn’t have a family, I might actually offer refuge.

I think most people will say they would help, but when push comes to shove, I think most people aren’t really that brave.

Thinking about it makes me appreciate the balls of those really did it.

19

[QUOTE=GuanoLad]
I would weigh the known risks, but tend towards helping out a person who needed it.
[/QUOTE]

Bolding mine.

I don’t know exactly what the risks would be for the scenario the OP describes. While I agree with the senitment many have expressed (“Sure I’d want to help”) I’d think it would make a difference to people’s thought process if the risk were known to be “guaranteed, absolute, 100% certain and immediate reprisal killing of yourself and your family” versus “a 35% chance of being caught and sent to a concentration camp” versus “a 5% chance of being caught and sent to civilian jail.” I just don’t know which is closer to accurate, and I think the answer to that would necessarily have at least some influence on most people who weren’t named Schindler or Maximillian Kolbe.

20

[QUOTE=Diogenes the Cynic]

Thinking about it makes me appreciate the balls of those really did it.
[/QUOTE]

It also makes one grateful that we don’t have to confront such choices in our lives. Being a hero is great in theory, probably scary as crap IRL.

I don’t think a meaningful answer to the OP is possible – not because it’s a stupid OP or because I think people are engaged in easy moral posturing by saying they’d help. It’s more that we really can’t understand the mindset and variables involved.

*As noted, just how big a risk am I being asked to take, and what is the downside?
*I live near Auschwitz. Okay, that makes me (probably?) a Pole. The Poles have also been declared sub-humans and slated for, if not annihilation, something pretty bad. Does this make me more likely to help the Jewish guy, on the theory that my enemy’s enemy, etc., or less likely, because every man for himself and no way I’m going to risk calling attention to the Polish community?
*Where do I live? A rambling old chateau with a partially bricked over wine cellar in the sub-basement, or an 8’ x 10’ shack?
*What’s my endgame with this guy? Is there some highly-efficient underground that will spirit him away after a few days, or am I stuck with him indefinitely?
*How frequent are the German patrols?
*Are my neighbors likely to inform on me?
*What stage of the War is it, and who do I think is likely to win? If the Allies are forty miles away and the handwriting’s on the wall that the Reich will crumble, the Americans will soon be here to protect me, and I’ll be a hero, I probably have a different mindset than if it’s 1941, the historic inevitability of German victory seems assured, and the proposition is that I must attempt to shelter the last Jew in captivity through decades of totalitarian rule – awkward. Also, the Germans may behave differently depending on their own assessment of where things are headed. A number of military commanders and (I think) concentration camp commandants disobeyed some of Hitler’s scorched-earth, kill 'em all and go down in flames, orders in the last months of the war, not only out of revulsion but out of some calculated decision that it would play better when they inevitably found themselves explaining their conduct to the victorious Allies.