THE CAMPS DON’T COME FIRST
What psychiatry taught me about how history really begins.
“Well, everyone wants to kill the Jews...”
Growing up Jewish, I don’t remember a time when the Holocaust wasn’t quietly present. No one sat me down for formal lessons about genocide. It simply existed in the background of life, woven into synagogue services, Hebrew school, Confirmation Class for my synagogue (in the 1970’s we were instructed how to avoid all the cults trying to convert Jews), documentaries on television, and the occasional photograph in a history book that seemed far more disturbing than the surrounding pages. Like many Jewish children of my generation, I learned the phrase Never Again long before I understood exactly what had happened the first time.
Some of my strongest memories come from the annual Passover Seders at my grandfather’s house. The dining room was loud, filled with overlapping conversations, children wandering in and out, and adults who assumed we weren’t paying attention. Every so often, though, a sentence would rise above the noise and stay with me. “Everyone wants to kill the Jews”.
Later, perhaps during an entirely different conversation, another voice would answer,
“You can’t blame that on the Jews.”
I doubt anyone intended those comments to become childhood memories, but they did. Long before I understood the history behind them, I understood that the adults around the table viewed antisemitism not as an ancient tragedy but as something that never entirely disappeared.
As a child, I imagined history unfolding in dramatic chapters. There was a beginning, a middle, and an unmistakable end. The Holocaust fit neatly into that pattern. Good people eventually defeated bad people, the camps were liberated, and Never Again meant humanity had learned its lesson.
Psychiatry slowly dismantled that way of thinking.
After more than twenty years of listening to patients tell me about their lives, I’ve become suspicious of dramatic turning points. Most people cannot identify the day their depression began, when anxiety quietly started shrinking their world, or when an occasional drink became a dependence. Looking back, those changes often seem obvious. Living through them, they rarely do. They accumulate so gradually that, before long, the new normal simply feels normal.
The more history I read, the more familiar that pattern became. We remember the Holocaust through barbed wire, cattle cars, crematoria, and skeletal survivors, but those were the end of the story, not the beginning. The beginning looked ordinary. It looked like elections, newspapers, economic anxiety, conspiracy theories, bureaucratic rules, and neighbors who slowly learned to speak about one another differently. No single step foretold Auschwitz. Seen together, those steps quietly altered what people considered imaginable.
Medicine teaches the same lesson. Heart attacks begin years before the ambulance arrives. Cirrhosis begins long before liver failure. Suicide rarely begins on the day someone dies. By the time a crisis becomes unmistakable, the underlying process has usually been unfolding for years. Reading Primo Levi, Viktor Frankl, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, I found myself recognizing that same rhythm. Catastrophes dominate history books because they are impossible to ignore. The quieter years that made them possible are easier to overlook.
What fascinates me is not whether history repeats itself, but how ordinary people gradually accept ideas that would once have shocked them. How does the unthinkable become familiar? What happened to Israel? To Zionism? How is Jewish history able to countenance their treatment of the indigenous Palestinians and others in Lebanon and Syria? Those questions have occupied historians for generations. They have gradually become some of the most interesting questions in psychiatry as well.
• Democracies generally erode gradually rather than collapsing overnight.¹
• Human beings are remarkably poor at recognizing gradual change while living through it.²
• The psychological processes that shape individuals often resemble those that shape societies.³
As a boy, I thought Never Again was about how history ends.
I’ve come to believe it is really about learning to recognize how history begins.
History Doesn’t Feel Like History
One of the unexpected pleasures of getting older is discovering that books change as much as people do. The words remain exactly the same, yet somehow they become entirely different books.
I first read Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning in college. Like most students, I admired its resilience and philosophy. Years later, after medical school, it became a book about survival. Then I read it again after years of listening to patients describe depression, addiction, grief, trauma, divorce, and recovery. This time it became a book about adaptation. Frankl hadn’t changed. I had.
The same thing happened with Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. When I was younger, I focused on the extraordinary events they described. Reading them decades later, I became fascinated by something much quieter. Their books were filled with ordinary people trying to continue ordinary lives while the world around them gradually became anything but ordinary.
That shouldn’t have surprised me.
History has never exempted people from paying bills, raising children, worrying about work, arguing with their spouses, or deciding what to make for dinner. Revolutions still require grocery stores. Dictatorships still contain birthday parties. Even societies coming apart at the seams remain filled with people trying to get through another Tuesday.
History has an unfortunate habit of unfolding while everyone is busy living their lives.
The more memoirs I read, the less satisfied I became with the way history is usually taught. Textbooks compress years into paragraphs and decades into chapters, creating the illusion that everyone recognized the turning points as they occurred. Memoirs tell a different story. They unfold one ordinary day at a time. The people living through those events had no chapter titles announcing that history was about to change direction. They simply woke up each morning and tried to make sense of the world they found themselves in.
That uncertainty felt remarkably familiar.
Patients often tell me, “I don’t know when this started.” A marriage slowly grows distant. Alcohol becomes a nightly routine. Panic attacks quietly redraw the boundaries of someone’s life. Looking back, the pattern seems obvious. Living through it, almost no one recognizes it.
Perhaps that’s why I eventually stopped asking how entire societies could fail to recognize what was happening around them. The better question became why I ever imagined they would.
• Survivors of authoritarian regimes consistently describe adaptation as gradual rather than sudden.⁴
• Hindsight exaggerates our belief that the past was more predictable than it actually was.⁵
• Memoirs often reveal dimensions of history that traditional narratives cannot.⁶
Looking back, I think I misunderstood Never Again. I thought it was asking us to remember history. It may actually be asking us to recognize it before someone gives it a name.
Ordinary People
There was one book I almost dreaded reading again.
When I first picked up Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men, I expected a study of monsters. Instead, I met truck drivers, dockworkers, salesmen, clerks, fathers, and middle-aged reservists from Hamburg. They were not chosen because they were unusually cruel or fanatically ideological. They were painfully ordinary. Yet, over time, many became willing participants in the murder of tens of thousands of Jews in occupied Poland.
That was far more disturbing than if Browning had described psychopaths.
Psychiatry has taught me that people rarely experience themselves as villains. They explain themselves. They justify themselves. They remember events in ways that allow them to remain decent people in their own eyes. I’ve heard those explanations thousands of times in my office. They are usually sincere. Most of us don’t wake up intending to make bad decisions. We tell ourselves that we had no better choice, that everyone else would have done the same thing, or that tomorrow will somehow make today’s compromise worthwhile.
History suggests we have always done the same.
Reading memoirs from the twentieth century, I was struck less by the dictators than by everyone else. Parents still worried about report cards. Couples still argued about money. Friends still met for dinner. Children still played outside. Daily life retained a stubborn normality even as the boundaries of that normality were quietly shifting. History, it turns out, doesn’t interrupt ordinary life. It disguises itself as ordinary life.
That realization has changed the way I read history and the way I practice psychiatry. I’m much less interested in dividing people into heroes and villains than I once was. Those categories are comforting, but they explain surprisingly little. Human beings are more complicated than that. Under the right circumstances, we are capable of remarkable generosity, astonishing courage, quiet indifference, and extraordinary cruelty. Sometimes all within the same lifetime.
Perhaps that is why Browning’s title has stayed with me for so many years. He didn’t call the book Evil Men. He called it Ordinary Men.
• Christopher Browning demonstrated that many perpetrators of the Holocaust were psychologically ordinary rather than uniquely sadistic.⁷
• Social conformity and obedience profoundly influence human behavior.⁸
• Most people experience themselves as acting reasonably, even when history later reaches a different conclusion.⁹
The Comfort of Certainty
One of the more humbling lessons psychiatry has taught me is how uncomfortable human beings are with uncertainty.
Patients don’t simply come looking for treatment. They come looking for explanations. They want to know why their marriage failed, why their child developed schizophrenia, why panic attacks appeared after years of perfect health, why going to sleep is so frightening, or why they can’t seem to stop drinking. Sometimes medicine provides satisfying answers. Quite often it doesn’t. Human beings are wonderfully complicated, and our brains seem almost incapable of accepting that complicated things sometimes have complicated causes.
When we can’t know we often become convinced. That tendency extends far beyond psychiatry.
Read enough history and you begin noticing that certainty has always been one of the most valuable political commodities ever invented. People are naturally drawn to those who promise simple explanations for complex problems. Economic hardship becomes the fault of one group. Crime becomes the fault of another. Political disagreement becomes evidence of betrayal rather than disagreement. The explanations are emotionally satisfying precisely because they remove uncertainty from the equation.
Psychiatry has made me deeply suspicious of explanations that seem too complete.
The patients who have taught me the most have almost always been the ones who refused to fit neatly into my expectations. Diagnoses changed. Family members revealed information that transformed my understanding of a case. Laboratory results overturned confident assumptions. Every time I thought I had finally learned how predictable people were, another patient reminded me that they weren’t.
History has had much the same effect.
The more I read, the less interested I become in people who claim to understand everything. Historians argue because history is complicated. Scientists argue because reality is complicated. Psychiatrists argue because people are complicated. Curiously, the people who seem most certain are often discussing subjects that are the least certain of all.
Perhaps that is why certainty has come to worry me more than uncertainty. Uncertainty keeps asking questions. Certainty usually believes it has already found the answers.
• Intellectual humility is associated with better judgment and greater openness to new evidence.¹⁰
• People naturally prefer simple explanations to complex ones, even when reality is more nuanced.¹¹
• Confidence and accuracy are only weakly correlated.¹²
Never Again
As I’ve grown older, I’ve found myself thinking more often about those Passover Seders at my grandfather’s house. At the time, I was mostly interested in getting back to my cousins or seeing what dessert might be coming next. The adults seemed to inhabit a different world; one filled with memories and anxieties that belonged to another generation.
Only years later did I realize they weren’t simply talking about the Holocaust. They were trying to remember how ordinary the world had seemed before everything changed. As a boy, I assumed Never Again referred to concentration camps, mass graves, and liberation. Those were certainly the images I carried with me. Psychiatry, history, and a lifetime of reading gradually taught me that those images belong to the final chapter, not the first.
The first chapter is much quieter. It is written in ordinary conversations, ordinary compromises, ordinary fears, and ordinary people trying to make sense of a changing world. It is written by neighbors who slowly become strangers, by institutions that drift almost imperceptibly, and by millions of people who wake each morning believing they are simply living another ordinary day.
That realization has changed what Never Again means to me. It is no longer simply a promise about the future. It is a discipline of attention. It asks us to remain curious when certainty feels easier, to notice gradual change before it becomes ordinary, and to remember that history rarely announces itself while it is being lived.
Perhaps that was the lesson I had been hearing all along without understanding it. The adults at those Seders weren’t trying to make frightened children. They were trying to make attentive adults.
Hope
There is one more thing I understand now that I couldn’t have appreciated as a child.
For Jews of my grandparents’ generation, the creation of the State of Israel was about far more than geopolitics. Whatever one’s views of its governments, policies, or the conflicts that continue to surround it, Israel represented something profoundly psychological. After nearly two thousand years of exile, expulsions, pogroms, and, ultimately, the Holocaust, there was, for the first time in centuries, a place that suggested history might not always end the same way. A place where Jews might no longer remain entirely at the mercy of other nations.
It is no accident that Israel’s national anthem is HaTikva—The Hope. That hope has never depended on believing Israel is perfect. No nation is. It rests on something more enduring: the belief that the future is not condemned to repeat the past. Looking back, I think that was the lesson hidden inside those noisy Passover Seders. The adults weren’t trying to teach us to fear history. They were trying to teach us to remember it without surrendering to it.
When I was a boy, I thought the lesson of the Holocaust was Never Again. I still believe that. But I have come to think that Never Again is only half the lesson. The other half is HaTikva.
Hope.
Notes and Sources
1. Levitsky, Steven, & Ziblatt, Daniel. How Democracies Die. Crown, 2018.
2. Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.
3. Frankl, Viktor E. Man’s Search for Meaning. Beacon Press, 1946/2006.
4. Levi, Primo. If This Is a Man (Survival in Auschwitz). Orion Press, 1959.
5. Wiesel, Elie. Night. Hill and Wang, 1960.
6. Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr. The Gulag Archipelago. Harper & Row, 1973.
7. Browning, Christopher R. Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. HarperCollins, 1992.
8. Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Viking Press, 1963.
9. Lifton, Robert Jay. The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide. Basic Books, 1986.
10. Tetlock, Philip E., & Gardner, Dan. Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction. Crown, 2015.
11. Sagan, Carl. The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. Random House, 1995.
12. Ben-Ghiat, Ruth. Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present. W. W. Norton, 2020.
13. Gilbert, Martin. The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe During the Second World War. Henry Holt, 1985.
14. Imber, Naftali Herz. Tikvatenu (”Our Hope”), 1878, the poem on which Israel’s national anthem, HaTikva, is based.