One man beat prisoners for sport, the other paid for their medicine

One man beat prisoners for the smallest infractions and did it more cruelly than most of the guards he answered to. The other, wearing an SS uniform and holding real power over life and death, paid, out of his own pocket, quietly, without anyone knowing until after the war, for medicine that camp doctors couldn't otherwise get for the sick. The first man was a prisoner himself: the senior camp warden of the hut where Viktor Frankl worked, someone who should, by every outside measure, have had every reason for solidarity with the men under him. The second man was the SS commander of that same camp.

Frankl draws a hard conclusion from watching this play out repeatedly, not just in this one pair of men. Knowing whether someone was a guard or a prisoner told you almost nothing about whether they would be cruel or kind. Some guards took real pleasure in taking small comforts away from starving men, overturning a stove that prisoners were finally allowed to warm themselves at, just to watch it happen. Others quietly slipped a prisoner an extra piece of bread, saved from their own ration. Some prisoners who were given a scrap of power, as Capos, camp trustees drawn from the prisoners' own ranks, became harsher than the guards themselves, sometimes never having gone hungry a day in their lives before the camp, and now finally on the giving end of the cruelty. Others, given the same scrap of power, treated the men under them fairly.

From this, Frankl reaches what he calls a conclusion about there being only two races of people in the world, the decent and the indecent, and insists both exist inside every group, without exception. No political party, no nation, no professional class, no set of victims and no set of persecutors is made up entirely of one kind. The line runs, in his words, through all human beings, reaching into the lowest depths, becoming visible even at the bottom of an abyss as extreme as a concentration camp. If a place that brutal could not sort people cleanly along its most obvious dividing line, guard versus prisoner, then dividing people cleanly along any group line at all is very likely a mistake, no matter how tempting the label.

Next time you catch yourself forming an opinion about someone based mainly on which group, side, or category they belong to, stop and ask what specific thing they actually did, that's your only real evidence, not the label. Go looking, deliberately, for the individual act of decency or cruelty rather than settling for the reputation of the group as a whole. If you're ever handed even a small scrap of power over someone else, notice how easily it could nudge you toward either harshness or fairness, and choose on purpose. And turn the same question back on yourself in ordinary moments, not which side am I on, but which way am I actually behaving right now, because that question is the only one that was ever really answerable.