The Unremarked Days

I am going to tell you a story. Some of you will have encountered it before, in some form, at some point in your education or your reading and some of you may be encountering it for the first time on this page. Either way, I want to ask something of you before I begin. If the story is familiar to you, please slow down, because the familiarity of a story can harden over time into a kind of stock piety that allows the story to pass over the reader without quite reaching them, and this chapter cannot do what it needs to do if the story passes over you. If the story is new to you, please slow down also, because the story is one of the small number of human accounts the whole book has been preparing you to receive, and it deserves to be received with attention rather than skimmed for its plot. Either way, this chapter is asking for your attention in a way that the rest of the book has not yet asked for it. I will not be saying more than I have to. What I say will need you to do work with it.

There were eight people in a small set of rooms above a warehouse in Amsterdam from July of 1942 until August of 1944. Their names were Otto Frank, Edith Frank, Margot Frank, Anne Frank, Hermann van Pels, Auguste van Pels, Peter van Pels, and Fritz Pfeffer. They were Jewish. They were hiding from the German occupation authorities of the Netherlands, who were, at that point in the war, in the process of deporting the Jews of the Netherlands to camps in Eastern Europe where most of them would be killed. The eight in the annex above the warehouse had chosen, when the deportation orders for them began to arrive, to attempt to survive by going into hiding rather than reporting for deportation. They were able to attempt this because Otto Frank had built up, over the years of his business in Amsterdam, a relationship of trust with a small number of his Dutch employees, and those employees had agreed to take on the risk of helping the eight people in the annex stay alive.

There were, principally, five of them. Their names were Miep Gies, Bep Voskuijl, Johannes Kleiman, Victor Kugler, and Jan Gies. There were others who knew, or who assisted in smaller ways. The five were the ones who carried the weight of the hiding across the two years and one month that the hiding lasted. The work they did was the work of bringing food into the annex when food was rationed and the bringing-in of extra rations was, in itself, a piece of evidence that could lead the community to suspect that something was being concealed, the work of bringing in books and supplies for the children to continue their education, the work of carrying messages in and out, the work of maintaining the appearance to the wider world and to the other employees of the business, that nothing unusual was occurring and the work of making the business itself continue to function in such a way that the office above it could continue to be used for hiding without arousing suspicion. The work was sustained for two years and one month.

On the fourth of August, 1944, the annex was raided, on information apparently provided by someone whose identity has never been definitively established. The eight people in the annex were arrested. Seven of the eight died in the camps to which they were deported, in the months between the arrest and the end of the war the following spring. Otto Frank survived, by what combination of accident and constitution it is not possible to say with confidence. He returned to Amsterdam in June of 1945. Miep Gies, who had recovered the papers from the annex after the arrest and had kept them in her desk drawer, gave the papers to him. Among the papers was the diary his younger daughter had kept across the years in the annex. Otto Frank read the diary and, after some hesitation, arranged for its publication. It has been translated into more than seventy languages and has been read by something in the order of thirty million people. The young woman who wrote it died in the camp at Bergen-Belsen in February or March of 1945, of typhus, a few weeks before the camp was liberated by British forces.

This is the story you know, if you have heard it before. I want to spend the rest of the chapter on three questions the story puts to you, in the order in which the questions can usefully be put.

The first question is the question about the five. Who were they, before they were the five? They were not in any sense, what the surrounding culture would have recognised as exceptional. Miep Gies was a young woman who had grown up in Vienna, been sent to the Netherlands as a child during the food shortages after the First World War, been adopted in effect by the Dutch family that had taken her in, and grown-up Dutch. She was a secretary in Otto Frank's business. She had married a Dutch man, Jan Gies, who was a social worker. Bep Voskuijl was, similarly, a young Dutch woman employed in the business; her father worked in the warehouse below the annex and was, also, part of what was being done. Johannes Kleiman and Victor Kugler were men who had worked with Otto Frank in his business for years. They were not religious heroes or political activists. They were people who had built relationships of trust with their employer across the ordinary years of an ordinary business, and who had, when the moment came, found that the trust they had built obligated them to actions whose risk was extreme.

This is the first thing to understand about the five. They were not, before the moment came that asked them what they would do, the kind of people the surrounding culture would have identified as the kind of people who would have done what they did. There was nothing in their public profile, before the war, that would have allowed a casual observer to predict that, when asked, they would say yes to two years of life-threatening risk on behalf of people they had no obligation to under any law or any public morality of the country they were living in. They were ordinary people, conducting ordinary lives, in the kind of jobs that ordinary people conduct ordinary lives in. The Dutch society around them was, in those years, producing a great many other ordinary people in ordinary jobs in ordinary lives, and most of those other ordinary people did not, when asked, say yes. Most of them said no, in one form or another. Many of them did not have to say anything, because they were never asked. Some of them, when asked, did the opposite of what the five did, and turned in to the authorities the Jewish neighbours whose hiding they could have assisted instead.

The difference between the five and the others is the question this chapter is about, and the answer to it is the answer this whole book has been building toward. The five did what they did because of who they had become across the unremarked years of their lives, well before the moment arrived. They had not, in those years, been preparing themselves to hide Jews. They had not even been preparing themselves to do anything in particular. They had been doing the daily small work that everyone in their position had been doing — going to their jobs, raising their families, maintaining their friendships, and conducting their religious or non-religious lives — but they had been doing it in a way that, slowly and across enough small daily choices, had laid down in them a particular kind of person. The kind of person they had become was the kind of person who, when the moment came, found that they could not refuse what they were being asked. The refusal was not available to them because of who they were. The cost of refusing, for them, was not the cost it might have been for someone whose formation had not laid down what their formation had laid down. The cost of refusing, for them, was the cost of being someone other than who they had become, and that cost they were not, when it came to it, willing to pay.

The first question the story puts to you is therefore the question about your own formation. What has been laid down in you, across the unremarked years of your life so far, that would or would not equip you to be the kind of person who, when the moment came, found that the refusal was not available? You cannot know the answer with certainty until the moment comes. But you can know something about it now, by looking at the small daily choices you have been making, and the kind of person those choices have been making of you.

The Miep Gies who hid the Franks did not become that Miep Gies in August of 1942 when Otto Frank asked her to help. She had been becoming that Miep Gies across the previous twenty years of her life, in the choices about whom to be loyal to, what to consider as her own concern, how to relate to people whose interests were not protected by the law, and above all, what to do with the small daily inconveniences of being a person whose conduct was constrained by something other than what the law required. You are, right now, becoming the person you will be when your version of the moment arrives. The becoming is not theoretical. It is happening, every day, in what you do and what you choose not to do.

The second question is the question about your agency. The story is one of the great stories of moral agency in our global cultural inheritance, and it has been read, by most of the people who have read it, as a story about the heroism of a few people in an extraordinary moment. That interpretation is not wrong. But that interpretation has a particular consequence, which is that the moral agency the story dramatizes will be located, by most of its readers, in a particular kind of dramatic situation which demands extreme levels of courage or fortitude to face a moment of obvious danger, and where the decision that is made and action that is taken, history will remember and valorise. The sad irony of that kind of interpretation stems from its failure to place the story where it truly belongs - which are precisely the situations the readers themselves are actually in. The five who hid the Franks are admired. The agency required to do what they did is admired.

But the agency is, however, regarded as an agency that becomes available only in situations that the reader is not currently in, and unlikely to ever be. The reader, therefore, is permitted to admire what the five did without having to consider what the choices they are called to make in their daily lives are making of them.

This is, I think, the deepest failure of how the story has come to be read and interpreted. The agency the five exercised was not different in kind from the agency the reader is exercising, right now, in the situations the reader is actually in. The five had, before the moment came, been exercising the same kind of agency in the small situations that did not look like the moment. They had been deciding, in the small daily transactions of their lives, what kind of people to be. The agency they then exercised when the moment came was the natural continuation of the agency, they had been exercising all along. The agency was not summoned, in some sudden moment, by the demands of an extreme situation. The agency was the same agency they had been exercising in the unspectacular situations that did not appear to require agency at all.

You have agency. You have been exercising it across your life so far, in ways that, because they have not been dramatic, you may not have been recognising as the exercise of agency. The friend you have stood by when it cost you something to stand by them, or the colleague you have defended when defending them required you to take some small risk to your own position, or the conversation you have refused to participate in when participating would have required you to assent to something you could not assent to, would have been samples of the work you have done at a standard the workplace did not expect you to maintain. The kindness you have extended to a stranger whose interests no one was protecting, or the small daily refusals of the small daily corruptions also have been exercises of the agency that, in the moment of the story you know, the five exercised at the scale the moment required.

The second question the story puts to you is therefore the question of where you have been locating your own agency in your reading of your own life. Have you been locating it where it is, in the small daily situations that the surrounding culture has not labelled as situations of moral consequence? Or have you been locating it, in the way the story has often been interpreted, in some imagined future situation that the surrounding culture has labelled as a situation of moral consequence and that, by being so labelled, has been removed from the reach of your daily attention? The first location is correct. The second is mistaken in a way that lets you off, day after day, from the work that is in fact being asked of you in the situations you are in.

The third question is the hardest. I have been holding it back, because the first two have to be in place before the third can be asked. The third question is the question about whom the story is being told to, and about what the telling of it is asking of the people to whom it is being told.

The story has been told, across the seventy years of its public life, as a story about a particular danger in a particular time, and as a story about what righteousness looked like in the face of that particular danger. The framing has had useful effects. It has helped to fix, in the conscience of much of the literate world, the recognition that what was done to the Jews of Europe was a wrong of a kind and on a scale that should never be permitted to recur. It has helped to establish, in the founding of the international order that followed the Second World War, certain protections intended to prevent the recurrence. It has educated several generations of children, in many countries, in the recognition of what the danger looked like when it was operating, and in the recognition of what righteousness looked like in opposition to it.

The framing has also had a less useful effect, which I want to expose. The framing has located the danger in the past, and has also located the righteousness in the past. The story has come to be told as a story about people who did the right thing in a situation that is no longer the situation we are in. The story has come to be told, in effect, as a story about a moment that history has closed, and about a kind of moral demand that the closing of the moment has spared us from ever having to face ourselves. This is also a consequence of taking for granted that history is a linear march towards progress rather than a cycle where the past is both ever present and a portender of what is to come. The reader of the story is therefore left, by many of the ways the story is told, with the impression that the situation that it describes is not the reader's situation and never will be, that the demand is not being made of the reader and is unlikely to ever be made again, and that the question of whether the reader would have hidden the hunted child is a hypothetical question about a closed past rather than a real question about an open present and possible future.

This is not the truth. The structural condition that produced the situation of the five in Amsterdam is not a closed or resolved condition. It is a recurring condition, and it is operating, in different forms and at different scales, in every generation. There are, in every generation, populations whom the dominant arrangements have designated as fit to be hunted, or fit to be displaced, or fit to be killed, or fit to be allowed to die through the withdrawal of what was needed for them to live. There are, in every generation, people for whom the structural question that the five answered with their yes is a live question. There are, in every generation, ordinary people in ordinary jobs in ordinary lives who are being asked, in some form, by some moment that may or may not look like the moment in Amsterdam, what they will do. The story is not the story of a closed moment in a closed past. The story is the story of a structural recurrence, and the recurrence is happening now and it will continue.

I am going to refuse, here, to tell you what the contemporary populations are to whom this structural demand currently applies in your own life. There are several reasons. The first is that I do not know where you live, and the populations to whom the demand applies will vary, in their identity and in the specific shape of the demand, from country to country and from situation to situation. The second is that the work of identifying the populations is itself part of what the demand requires of you. If I do the work for you, I rob you of the work, and the work is part of the answer you must find to the question that is posed specifically to you. The third is that I do not want to give you, by naming particular populations, the chance to react to the naming rather than to do the work of finding the populations the work is asking you to find. That work is also yours.

What I can say is this. There are, in the country you live in, populations whom the dominant arrangements of your country have designated, in various ways and to various degrees, as fit to be treated as less than the full humans they are. The designations may be formal or informal; they may be loud or quiet; they may be in continuity with longer histories or they may be recent.

You know, if you have done the honest work of seeing your country with the clarity and objectivity that the previous chapters of this book have been asking, who these populations are. You need to know what is being done to them, and what is being permitted to be done to them, and what is being arranged in the public conversation so that what is being done to them is not adequately seen. You can also recognise now, how the dominant story of the country, in its explicit public language, does not describe a country in which such things are being done. You have, therefore, in some form, the situation of the five before the war, when the country they lived in had not yet declared itself to be the kind of country it was about to become. You have, in particular, the daily ordinary opportunity to make the small daily ordinary choices that will lay down in you, across the unremarked years, the kind of person who, when the moment comes, will find that the refusal is not available to them.

The moment may not come for you. Most people in most generations are not asked, in the dramatic form the moment asked of the five, what they will do. Most people in most generations are asked, instead, in the undramatic form that the years before the moment took for the five — in the small daily situations in which the kind of person they were becoming was being laid down. That form of the asking is the form your life is asking you right now. Whether you ever face the dramatic version is not the question over which you have control. The undramatic version is the question over which you have control. The undramatic version is being put to you now, and will be put to you tomorrow, and the day after, in every small daily encounter in which the kind of person you are becoming is being laid down.

I want to end this chapter with the simplest thing the chapter has been able to say. The five hid the Franks because of who they had become before the Franks asked them. The reader who is reading this book is, in their own life, every day, becoming someone. The question of who they are becoming is being answered, in real time, by what they are doing in the small daily situations of their life. This chapter cannot tell you, the reader, what the right answers are in your particular situations. This chapter can only ask you to recognise that the answers are being given, that the answers are accumulating into the kind of person you will be when your own version of the moment, whatever form it takes, arrives. The accumulation is the work this book has been about. The work begins again every morning. There is no day on which the work is finished. There is also no day on which it is too late to begin.

The epilogue will be brief.