The Ethics of Lying for Survival

A discussion of ethical lies and immoral truths through the lens of Louis Begley's novel "Wartime Lies."

If we define the goal of ethics as answering the question, “how should one live?” Louis Begley provides a very compelling follow-up question about the subjectivity of morals in his novel Wartime Lies. For contemporary Jewish youth, the Holocaust is a nearly inescapable topic. I vividly remember sitting on the school bus and imagining how I would live, should I ever be thrust into a world where the basis of my identity put a target on me, and my very Jewish nose. I envisioned myself at the front of the resistance, smuggling people out of camps and hiding them in the secret room behind the bookcase in my home (that I would have had prior to the genocide, in case such a crisis occurred). But could this meta inquiry ever be applied? I am not sure anymore. After closing the novel Wartime Lies the first thought that materialized in my mind was, would it be ethical for me to bleach my hair during the Holocaust? Doing so would be a physical manifestation of a lie, as I obscured my true identity. Whether it is morally righteous to bleach my hair in order to survive is not exactly something a 12-year-old, or even a 15-year-old, considers when they are devising a plan to save the world, but today it has this 23-year-old at a loss for words. Begley has left me wondering if we should even consider lying to be unethical as a default, because when it becomes a mechanism for survival against an oppressive machine, how can you call into question the morals of the oppressed? Ethics indeed requires that you think, and my attempt to explain Maciek’s horrendous mockery of “truth” as morally justifiable is providing me quite the challenge.

It would be easy to write off the fabrication of Maciek’s entire childhood as exactly what the title of the book suggests, Wartime Lies. However, that would be a grave oversimplification of his life. Maciek was born in a town called T., in Poland the same year that Adolf Hitler rose to power (5). As a Jew, his entire life would be defined by that moment. Right before his eyes people he loved came and went as a result of his family’s identity. His nursemaid Zosia, who could be credited with saving his life as a child, was forced to leave their home by 1939 because “what kind of a future could [she] have with the smell of Jew all about her?” (29). Shortly after, all the Jews in T. were outfitted with yellow stars and organized into ghettos. Maciek’s family was spared transport out of town and into the unknown by his father’s sister Tania, who became Maciek’s caretaker after his father was forced to join the army. Her ability to charm a German officer allowed them to escape T. the night before the last of the surviving Jews were exterminated. And so the lying began. For the next six years of Tania and Maciek’s lives, lying became a survival mechanism, and after the war its grip was inescapable. Anti-semitism did not end with Germany’s surrender, which demanded that their wartime lies extend into a new era of “peace.”

There is one moment that perfectly illustrates the message Begley is sending his readers, and it is necessary to analyze what it means in order to move forward after consuming his novel. Maciek’s experience with Catholicism in Warsaw is a testament to how manipulative religious “moral” obligations can be. In Church, Maciek quickly discovered that “it was evident that every Jew, even if he did not break the Commandments, was damned” (Begley 104). Reading this I wanted to reach my hand into the pages and shake him, to remind him that Jews fundamentally do not believe in hell. It is irrational to think otherwise, and yet the narrative that he was damned was almost irresistible to Maciek. He clung to it for the duration of the novel and the rest of his life, perhaps because he felt he had finally seized a grain of truth about his existence and he did not want to let go. He had deemed himself “a liar and a hypocrite” (105), but he was not lying when he made this proclamation. It was the truth.

Why do we cling so tightly to the truth? Is it not a grave essentialization to say that a capital ‘T’ truth even exists in this world? It is true that Adolf Hitler thought Jews were miserable, deplorable, insignificant human beings. He believed that to his very core, but just because he acted on his truth does not mean it was ethical, or moral; in fact, it was entirely the opposite. However, he was under the impression that he was doing a great service to the world for speaking his truth. Maciek fabricated his entire childhood to the point where “he became an embarrassment and slowly died [and] a man who bears one of the names Maciek used has replaced him” (180). He grew up and felt he had no identity because of the deceitful language that allowed him to survive the Holocaust. His body survived, but he still perceived himself to be dead. It begs the question: would Maciek have been better off in a concentration camp where he could have embraced his identity but would likely have died horrifically, body and soul? We are taught that the pursuit of justice necessitates finding the Truth behind every situation, but Maciek’s personal pursuit of Truth became debilitating. I am not sure it had to turn out that way. I believe it is possible to interpret Begley’s novel as a warning to his former self, on whom Maciek is loosely based; a warning not to get lost in such a trivial inquiry.

I find it interesting that in my International Relations curriculum we speak about political realism, liberal internationalism, cosmopolitanism, etc., but never explicitly about religion, which informs almost every one of these theories we have developed. Even secularism, which is the supposed opposite of religion, is defined in terms of the religion it opposes. This is important because violence in politics is increasingly justified by religion. As it relates to Wartime Lies, a priest was able to successfully convince a young Jewish boy that Catholicism was morally superior, which defined the rest of Maciek’s life. It seems to me that the pursuit of Truth through the lens of religion can actually be incredibly damaging to our minds. One cannot live their life inside of a question.

More generally in my Political Science courseload, it has become apparent to me that the Holocaust is a constantly hovering presence. It surfaces for comparison sake, and as a staple atrocity that should never be repeated, but I can not name a single case study that I have read on the matter (in the same way I have about the Syrian War or the genocide in Rwanda). This, in retrospect, seems alarming. Is there a better demonstration of how ethics actually plays out in our world than Hitler’s Germany? A war more absent of moral considerations? This is not to minimize other crimes against humanity which occurred in the 20th century, but when I think about the Holocaust it is impossible for me to forget a video loop I saw at Yad Vashem (the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem) of a mountain of dead Jewish bodies being bulldozed into the ground. It is difficult not to wonder who was operating the machinery that treated those bodies like piles of sticks. And I do not think this is because the Holocaust hits just a little closer to home for me. Hate can be an excellent teacher, but there is more to be learned from World War II than why things like Just War Theory are important. The fact of the matter is that humans will continue to behave in inhumane ways. Learning what drives them to do this, and how it forces those affected by it to behave, is equally relevant.

For me, Begley’s argument and his novel are extremely compelling. When we ask ourselves “how should one live” within an ethical framework it is also necessary to ask ourselves whose truth we are pursuing. An individual is not responsible to tell the truth to their government if it will make certain their own death; that is the opposite of justice. We are responsible for creating our own definitions of what it means to live ethically, and we are responsible for challenging other definitions if they impede upon the basic human rights of millions of people. I want to be clear that I am not trying to claim that Maciek’s experience was wrong, or that if he behaved differently he could have saved himself some mental anguish. A nine-year-old boy cannot be expected to put so much thought into his survival “performance” and what the implications may be for him as an adult, but certainly there is something to be learned from this novel and from Begley’s own life experience. This story, as with most Holocaust stories, does not have a clean-cut, happy ending. That is not how real life works. When the world expects ethics to always have an easy answer or life to always have a satisfactory resolution, we lose sight of its subjective nature. The truth is not explicit. Possibly the greatest tool for survival an individual can have in their belt is the ability to create their own Truth, and live it.

References

Begley, Louis. Wartime Lies. Random House Publishing Group, 2004.

This was originally written for a Political Science course called Ethics and International Relations and has been adapted for this platform.