Howard Jacobson tells of a question put to him by a Holocaust survivor:
"In the mornings," he said, "in Buchenwald, when the guards lined us up to count us, to see how many had survived the night, and we stood there in the cold in just our shirts and bare feet, an orchestra played, a Jewish orchestra playing classical music. It had no effect on me. I was too numb to feel anything. Now, before I am able to sleep, I have to listen to classical music. No, it doesn't bring back memories of the music the orchestra played then. I listen to classical music now because it helps me to forget. They are not connected. But this is my question – why did the Germans order that music to be played?"
I shook my head. Because they loved music so much they didn't want an hour to pass, even in Buchenwald, in which they didn't hear any? Because they especially liked the way Jews made music and knew there would soon be no Jews left to make it? Because they wanted further to refine their cruelty: "You think of yourselves as cultivated, well look at you now!" Who knows? Who knows anything?
I have no more claim to know about this than anyone else does, and I certainly have no directly relevant experience. However, one thing I have taken from the reading I've done in this area - from Primo Levi, and David Rousset, and Charlotte Delbo, and Elie Wiesel, as also from Dostoyevsky - is that people seem not to need reasons as such to do this kind of thing. There is no limit to the inventiveness of the human capacity for cruelty, and in that sense evil is bottomless. This doesn't mean either that everyone will do evil or that humans are more evil than good. It only means that people's creative talents are boundless and when they apply themselves to cruelty no moral or other barrier will restrict them from horrors or from ghastly ingenuities. This is a conclusion written not only, everywhere, in the history of the Holocaust but also in a thousand and more other episodes of moral criminality.
It is also why so many well-meaning sociologies and psychologies of extreme human wrong-doing miss a certain mark. Endeavouring to find preceding causes influencing individuals to behave badly - something one can always do because no human action comes out of a causal vacuum - they have a tendency then to downplay the gravity of the evil committed, as if it proceeded by an unbroken chain from its putative causes. But what the example Howard was given here shows is that such evils always 'exceed' their causes, real or supposed. As depressing as it is to have to acknowledge this, they reflect those human sources of all that is also admirable about our species - the freedom to choose and the fertility of the human imagination.