of Prague’s Jewish community and the residents of Lidice and Ležáky—whom the Nazis murdered in retaliation.14
The order to assassinate Heydrich, issued in London, raises as many moral questions as it resolves. For eight decades, its calculus has been contested. In the piece cited above, Hauner compares the July 20 Plot and Operation Anthropoid. In neither case, he contends, did those who devised the attacks transcend their own self-interest. He recounts that exiled Czechoslovak president Edvard Beneš approved the mission against Heydrich largely to advance his own political aims.15 Madeleine Albright, whose father advised Beneš in London, describes the same in her memoir, Prague Winter. The assassination, she writes, could be taken as “a bold strike for justice or an impetuous blunder by a leader trying too hard to make an impression.”16
Were the grounds good enough? Could Operation Anthropoid’s catastrophic human cost ever be justified? Who, Trouillot might spur us to ask, do we remember as its heroes? Who do we forget? “[F]ull of the hope of immortality,” the Orthodox Church of the Czech Lands and Slovakia proclaimed in 2020, the “host of men and women” who sheltered the paratroopers “did not fear the tyranny of the godless” and “gave their souls into the hands of the Lord of life with faith.”17 Martyr-saints, the Church canonized them.18 How do I honor the faithful choices that the Sonnevends made, choices that condemned not only each of them but those they loved?
I do not purport to have the answers. Tempting though it is to picture myself in my relatives’ image, their sacrifices are not my own. I know nothing of the courage they mustered. I cannot fathom the hell they endured. However improbable it may be that a descendant of the Sonnevends should, as I did through FASPE, enter the House of the Wannsee Conference and behold the lavish room where Heydrich coordinated plans for mass murder, the mantle of resistance is not mine to claim.
The identities I hold are hegemonic. As a white man, I profit from anti-Blackness and all forms of white-supremacist racism. As a compulsive consumer, I participate in neocolonial systems of exploitation and compound the climate crisis. The list goes on: I am Christian, cisgender, non-disabled, of means, straight. I was born a U.S. citizen to parents who met in the Ivy League. I have, in turn, a prestigious education—and the veneer of authority it confers. My privileges come at the expense of others; I am, in my way, complicit, even as I seek to do right.
These facts do not preclude me from choosing right—far from it. They do not absolve me of responsibility. But I would delude myself to think that my identity does not affect my moral perception. It is material to the choices that I make. I am susceptible, then, to the illusion that I can choose such a thing as perfect righteousness. Though we do not often understand our choices today in terms of “collaboration” and “resistance,” neither category is a relic. How I understand them in relation to the Holocaust reveals whether I see them in my own life.
I had hoped, even expected, that FASPE would ground me in moral bedrock. I imagined learning principles that could guide my decisions. I had it wrong: FASPE issued a call, not a credential—the call to be and to remain troubled, to recall the horror I felt at Birkenau, to remember that I am not so far removed.
Jonathan Ort was a 2023 FASPE Clergy and Religious Leaders Fellow. He holds a Master of Divinity degree from Yale Divinity School and is currently pursuing a PhD in history at the University of Chicago.
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