It is difficult to write a preface to books like this one (a memoir of World War II regarding medical experiments on prisoners), difficult to write anything at all, to add anything.
The Polish-British sociologist Zygmunt Bauman (1925–2017) writes that it is terrible to imagine that it was a close call and we could have been among the victims. Much more terrible, however, is that it was a close call and we could have been among the perpetrators. It is not that "it" could have happened to us, but rather that we could have committed it. All that happened was perpetrated by the same people as ourselves, and it is horrifying to think about it.
We would like to believe that all those [perpetrators of evil] were pathological personalities, sadists, or perhaps in some manner uneducated primitives, certainly from another universe than us. Unfortunately, everything indicates that the opposite is true. Most of them were doctors who spent their youth at the most prestigious universities and would likely have completed their careers as respected professors of research institutes had there been no war, doctors whose portraits would probably adorn the entrance halls of medical faculties in peacetime.
Is there even a person who would not be capable of such evil? Before World War II, we would have labeled such a question as absurd and rightly would have taken offense. After the war, we no longer dare to exclude the unimaginable. To the question "Who wanted it?" everyone will answer: "Those others!" And everyone will mean those others in the world outside, and no one will think that this "other" resides within ourselves, in our unconscious, unknown depths, and could be a part of our own soul.
(Marek Vácha, excerpts from the preface to Wanda Połtawska's book And I Fear Dreams)
