I constantly think about the transmission of racist and hateful thought, specifically the ways that this thought gets passed down from generation to generation. Along with this, I think about the ways that everyday people, who in their hearts know what they see happening around them is wrong, end up becoming part and parcel of the oppression enacted upon others. These two topics have appeared over and over again in recent texts that I have read, notably Magda Szabó’s Katalin Street and Gregor von Rezzori’s Memoirs of an Anti-Semite. I’ve written about this topic countless times before, and when I do, I always think about specific images such as Reginald Marsh’s This is Her First Lynching or the 1992 photgraph of a young child at a Klan rally, dressed in Klan attire, standing in front of a Black Georgia state trooper pointing at his own reflection in the trooper’s riot shield. While Szabó’s and Rezzori’s novels deal with anti-Semitism and the Holocaust and the images I mention deal with Jim Crow and lynching, there are overlaps with the insidious creeping in of racism and xenophobia that perpetuates itself, even when people know its harm.

Three families live next to one another in Szabó’s Katalin Street: the Helds, the Elekeses, and the Bálints. The Helds are Jewish, and the novel opens in 1933, when the Nazis rise to power. In the second section, which takes place in 1944, the Bálints take care of Henriette Held after the Nazis deport them to an unknown place, presumably a concentration or death camp because they are murdered. The Nazis confiscate the Held home, turning it inside out, and Henriette, wanting to see her home, leaves the Bálint home, where they hide her, and goes through the gardens that connect the families’ houses, into her own yard. A Nazi solider sees her, and as she tries to escape into the Elekeses’ garden, he shoots her and kills her.

The Bálints keep Henriette’s presence in their home a secret, even from the Ekeleses. The only member of the Ekeles family that knows the truth is Iren, and she narrates why the Bálints don’t tell the rest of the family about Henriette and instead tell them that Henriette went with her parents away from Budapest. Blanka, Iren’s sister, would possibly give away Henriette and the least bit of provocation because of her fears, and their mother couldn’t keep a secret for anything. Iren spends the most time on why they kept the secret away from Mr. Ekeles, a teacher and scholar.

Iren tells us that her father understood the situation “and that it was natural and proper” that the Bálints hide Henriette and protect her. However, his firm belief in submitting to authority would not allow him to keep the secret if he knew about it. He knew “it was actually illegal to hide such people, the law expressly forbade it, and respect for the laws of the land — even the most immoral of them — ran deep in him as the marrow in his bones.” He saw the persecution happening around him, and what he saw “filled him with astonishment and dismay,” but he chose not to act, thus falling in line with the Nazi regime’s plans and programs.

Iren tells us that Mr. Ekeles Christian faith and his position as an educator caused him to reject “the beliefs and attitudes of the fascists.” Yet, his belief in submitting to authority, which may have stemmed from Christian faith and Romans 13, undercut his rejection of fascist ideology and led him to fall in line. He maintained this position until the Helds’ murder. Their murders led him to guilt, a guilt brought about by his inaction to try and save individuals he cared about from death. Iren tells us that those moments would “smash his brittle morality to pieces,” and they would leave him, for the rest of life, unable to “forgive himself for what followed.”

Mr. Ekeles could not forgive himself, not just because he allowed the Helds to die, but because at that moment he was “in a position to help no one.” He allowed himself to get sucked into the systemic murder of Jews and others in Budapest even though he disagreed with the ideology that led to it. He did so because he believed that he should, as a Christian, submit to authority. This blind faith of those in power, based on Christian beliefs in texts such as Romans 13 that tell us to obey those that God has placed above us in positions of authority, led to the murder of a family that Ekeles, if he assisted the Bálints, could possibly have saved.

In this moment, Szabó brings home one of the key questions people ask about the Holocaust: How could people allow this atrocity to happen? That question, of course, is multifaceted because we could ask how people in positions of power could allow it to happen, how everyday people could not know what is happening, or how someone like Mr. Ekeles, who adamantly opposed to the happenings, still did not fight back in some way when he could. The last question, for me, is extremely important because it asks us to think about the continued violence and oppression when “good” people stay silent and just allow things to happen around them.

Mr. Ekeles inaction led to the Helds’ murder, but it also impacted him because the guilt that arose from his inaction impacted him for the rest of his life. We do not see if he made up for his inaction during the Communist years or any reparative work he did following the Holocaust. We only know that as he aged guilt ate at him, and he thought about his part in the Helds’ murder. Through his inaction and blind submission to authority, Mr. Ekeles became an accomplice to the atrocities inflicted upon the Helds and millions of others. His inaction makes him complicit, even if he disagreed with the fascist beliefs. His complicity eats at him, gnawing at his conscience and festering within him.

What could Mr. Ekeles have done? He could have spoken up as an educator, which would have cost him his job. He could have gone against the laws by agreeing to hide Henriette and protecting her. He could have done numerous things, some of which may have cost him his life, but instead of doing what he knew was right, he chose to go with the flow so as not to upset his own life. His story is important because in the face of anti-LGBTQ legislation, attacks on education, attacks on voting rights, and countless other affronts to democracy and the lives of countless individuals, we must ask ourselves, “What will I do to ensure life, liberty, and freedom for those being attacked?”

In the next post, I’ll dive into Gregor von Rezzori’s Memoirs of an Anti-Semite and the generational transmission of racist thought. Until then, what texts would you suggest? What are your thoughts? As always, let me know in the comments below. Make sure to follow me on Twitter @silaslapham.