The Holocaust was not a tsunami, it was a man-made event.
It is far more comforting to imagine it an aberration, something separate from humanity. What we must avoid, is to look at the Holocaust as some kind of supernatural event, in which we don't have to see it in the human terms of the people who committed it...to capture the horror of what all this means.
Once we treat the perpetrators as human beings, we are faced with the uncomfortable awareness -- are these people fundamentally different than I am? What would I have done?
-- Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men
