>Through the experiences of a relative who passed up the opportunity for vengeance and lived to regret it, I came to appreciate the terrible personal price that law-abiding citizens pay for leaving vengeance to the state. The relative was my late father-in-law, Jozef Nabel. As a result of being born Jewish in Poland in 1913, he witnessed during the Second World War the worst cruelties that modern state societies have invented.
>In the summer of 1945, after Germany’s surrender, Jozef, while still on active duty in that Polish division of the Red Army, requested and received his commander’s permission to take an armed platoon of fellow-soldiers to his village of Klaj, in order finally to be reunited with his family or else to discover their fate.
>On reaching Klaj, Jozef quickly learned that, in 1942, his father, trusting in human goodness and proudly insisting that his family did not stoop to hiding, was arrested by the Gestapo and loaded with other captives onto a transport train to a concentration camp, never to be heard of again. People considered unfit for labor were taken into a nearby field, shot, and buried in mass graves. Because Jozef’s father was in his sixties at the time of his arrest, the Klaj villagers assumed that that had been his fate.
>The villagers of Klaj also told Jozef that his mother, his sister, and his niece had managed to go into hiding with the family’s Catholic housekeeper in another village, several kilometres distant. Jozef and his platoon marched to that village, but the villagers there were more evasive than those in Klaj, and at first no one would say what had happened. But Jozef and his men had guns, and the villagers didn’t, and eventually someone told him the story.
>It turned out that the three women had succeeded in remaining hidden for about two years, until October, 1944, when an armed gang heard rumors of Jews hidden in the house. Assuming that all Jews had gold and money, the gang went to the house and demanded that the women turn over what they had, but they had nothing. The gang members then shot the three women. The villagers took Jozef to a site in the woods and pointed out shallow graves in which lay the remains of three bodies. By this time, a year after the killings, the bodies were unrecognizable, but clothing and hair identified them as the remains of his mother, his sister, and his niece.
>Jozef demanded that the villagers bring him the man who had led the gang of killers. Initially, they refused or professed ignorance. At that point, Jozef and his men rounded them all up and he told them, “If you don’t bring me the man within one hour, I will shoot every fourth person among you.” From the expression on Jozef’s face, the villagers saw that he meant it, and they brought him the man. Finally, Jozef stood face to face with the killer of his mother, sister, and niece, his gun loaded.
>But he found himself hesitating to shoot. His comrades understood his hesitation, and they told Jozef that he should leave the killer with them and they would shoot him. However, Jozef kept hearing in his mind the words “I’ve seen enough of people killing, and behaving like animals. I’ve done enough killing myself. This man behaved like an animal, but I don’t want to become an animal myself by shooting him.”
>One of Jozef’s closest friends in the platoon suggested that they could count on the new Polish government to administer justice, and that they should turn the man over to the police, so that he could be tried and punished. So it was that Jozef lowered his gun and brought the murderer to the police. He arranged for the remains of his mother, sister, and niece to be reburied in Kraków. The police imprisoned the murderer, investigated—and then, after about a year, released him. He was never punished beyond that relatively brief imprisonment.
>Jozef met and married a woman (my future mother-in-law) who was also a concentration-camp survivor, and, in 1948, they moved to Los Angeles. One day, he took out a sheaf of photographs and showed Marie a picture of three shallow excavations in a forest: the photo that he had taken of the graves of his mother, sister, and niece. Then, for the first time, he told Marie the story of how he discovered what had happened to them, and of his release of their killer. Once, when he was about ninety years old, he recounted the story to Marie and me together.
>On other occasions, he admitted to Marie, “Every day, still, before going to sleep, I think of my mother’s death, and of my having let her murderer go.” Until his own death, nearly sixty years after the murders of his parents and his release of his mother’s killer, Jozef remained tormented by regret and guilt—guilt that he had not been able to protect his parents, and regret that he had failed in his responsibility to take vengeance.
>We regularly ignore the fact that the thirst for vengeance is among the strongest of human emotions. It ranks with love, anger, grief, and fear, about which we talk incessantly. Modern state societies permit and encourage us to express our love, anger, grief, and fear, but not our thirst for vengeance. We grow up being taught that such feelings are primitive, something to be ashamed of and to transcend.
>>1268238
I've already resigned myself to the fact that if somebody harms my immediate family I'm absolutely killing the one responsible.
I'm not being fedora or anything, it's just what I would do. During my fedora/college phase I thought long and hard about it and thought I would let the person go. Now that I'm more mature I know I wouldnt. I simply can't abide the alternative, no matter what consequences I would face.
>>1268367
Diff is that jozef would face no consequences if he killed that man.
>>1268367
>I've already resigned myself to the fact that if somebody harms my immediate family I'm absolutely killing the one responsible.
absolutely this
>>1268545
>Also, you are being a fedora cause you cant know what you will actually do if you faced a similar situation.
I'm honestly as certain as I could possibly be about a thing. I might regret it later but it would happen.
>>1268229
>We grow up being taught that such feelings are primitive, something to be ashamed of and to transcend.
That's because it is.
>>1268367
>I'm not being fedora
>During my fedora stage I thought long and hard about it
>>1268649
People believe a lot of bullshit in college mang
>>1268611
What if you take vengeance on someone and it turns out it wasn't them who wronged you
