Book’s message felt with help of life experience

My senior year of high school was spent in relative luxury. With three years of high school… My senior year of high school was spent in relative luxury. With three years of high school under my belt, I had the idea that I had earned the right to lounge around in the hall, cuss at will, goof off in gym class and slouch my way through geoscience. I was a senior, and with my seniority came another important assumption: I was always right. I knew everything. My flawless logic and I were invincible.

I remember loathing the book “Lord of the Flies” by William Golding. And I wasn’t quiet about my distaste for the text, either. I sat front and center in my Advanced Placement English class frequently mouthing off about the cynical, bitter message of the book.

The premise and story of the book weren’t problematic, imperfect as they were. It was the message that bothered me: All people are, underneath the thin guise of civilization, savage animals, willing to perpetrate great cruelty for survival or entertainment. I scoffed at the assertion that everyone — myself included — could be capable of horrible violence and inhumanity.

“People,” I reassured myself and my class, “are simply not like that. People are good. Sometimes they stray from the track, but everyone wants to be good.”

We learned in class that the book was a response to World War II and, more specifically, the Holocaust. I assumed that William Golding was just so appalled by the terrible tragedy of the Holocaust that he was blinded to the truth of humanity. Certainly, the Holocaust was just an isolated instance of human cruelty, perpetrated by a few bad people. It was something we had all learned from, something that would never be repeated again.

That spring, my mother took up a collection from the family so I’d be able to go to Europe for nine days.

The trip was well worth her effort. Europe was just as memorable as I’d hoped. The Alps were lovely, the castles were picturesque, and the food was amazing. But the thing I took away from the trip wasn’t anything that could be captured in a photograph.

The turning point of my trip, and, in a way, the turning point of my life philosophy, came on the fourth day. We took a trip to Dachau, one of the smaller concentration camps. It had the sort of eeriness that could never be replicated by any fake haunted house or scary movie — the kind of eeriness earned by human suffering, best described by the words “uneasy silence.”

Sixty years after the end of WWII, nothing made a sound: not a bird, not a squirrel, not an insect. The only sound was the dry scraping of gravel. Even the people, previously chattering as they unloaded from the tour busses, were silent. I wandered around alone, still content in my naive assumptions.

I found my way to a small building in the far corner of the camp, where a tour guide was lecturing to a small group of people. He stood before the doors of several ovens. “Some people claim that the horizontal chimneys mean that the ovens were not operational, that they were never used. The truth is that the horizontal chimney allowed for the recycling of the hot air, thus creating a more efficient fire, which burned the corpses faster.”

“Some people claim?” His use of present tense unhinged my idea that everyone had learned from this tragedy. His description of the ultimate efficiency of the ovens left me speechless. There was no carelessness involved in this genocide, no momentary passion. On the contrary, everything was planned right down to the unconventional design of the ovens to maximize the number of corpses created and destroyed everyday.

When I returned home from Europe, I reread “Lord of the Flies.” This time I was more sympathetic to Golding. I read books about the Holocaust that detailed the banality of so many of the major and minor players in the “Final Solution” efforts. Teachers, ministers, housewives, people from all walks of life were involved in perpetrating horrible genocide.

I still can’t shake my memory of that tour guide’s words. For several years, whenever I met the eyes of a stranger in the street, I wondered if he were capable of the same efficient, premeditated cruelty.

I still want to — I have to — believe that people aren’t bad. Just as it was naive of me to believe that everyone is inherently good, so it is naive to believe that everyone is inherently bad. I see examples of both everyday. Sometimes it takes a little careful observation because goodness rarely makes the headlines.

Nowadays, it suffices to simply say that “human beings have great potential.” Not necessarily for good. Not necessarily for evil. Simply “great potential.” I leave it at that.

Ginger McCall has great potential. E-mail her at gpm5@pitt.edu.