On the top floor of the Jewish Museum in Sydney is a pile of shoes. They sit behind glass, in memory of the truckloads of shoes that were piled throughout concentration camps when the Second World War ended. Their owners had been gassed.

We carry a history that is at times stunning and at other times unbearable. We live after events that seem to defy words. We know the capacity for this world to sink to utterly self-destructive levels. We have borne witness to men manning aeroplanes, pointing them at buildings and flying into them. To a young, sick girl named Britney, trying to grow up in front of a camera, self-imploding again and again, while little girls copy her dance moves. Robert McNamara, the man who deployed thousands to fight in Vietnam, admitted that it was luck that saved the world from nuclear destruction only decades ago.[1] We have seen people closer to home carry the remnants of deep betrayal, trying to chip off bitterness. This world often seems absurd.

Confused by how to face events like these, we are often dominated by numbness and distraction. We don't know how to live with ourselves. Most of us don't know how to live in a world that hurts this much, so we tend to go along with life, paying alms to the machine of Hollywood so that it will tell us neat and clean stories that keep us entertained. Or we grow fascinated with the mess, addicted to the news, hoping that if we can understand this rag-tag world, perhaps we can also control it. As Tom Stoppard wrote, "All your life you live so close to truth, it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye, and when something nudges it into outline it is like being ambushed by a grotesque."[2]

Events like the Holocaust force us to face the grotesque of the world and our own cracked up hearts. They demand a response. Like it or not, we live after the Holocaust. We live after Rwanda and we live in the midst of Darfur. How do we ever find meaning after ashes like these?

This is the question being asked by one of this year's major films, The Reader.[3] It follows the lives of two people in post-World War II Germany, beginning in the era shortly after the end of the war. A 15-year-old school student named Michael meets a much older woman, a bus conductor named Hanna. They begin an affair, during which Michael reads Hanna some of the best literature in the English language, from Huckleberry Finn to Ulysses. The affair ends as quickly as it began, when Michael turns up to Hanna's home one day and finds it empty.

A few years later, Michael is studying law. He attends the trials of Nazi war criminals as part of his study. He is shocked to find that Hanna is one of the defendants. Before their affair, she was a guard who chose prisoners to be taken to gas chambers. The court case centres around one incident in which she and other guards watched 300 women die in a burning church.

The film then follows the next thirty years or so of Hanna's legacy. We see the various ways that people try to go on living, despite being irreparably scarred by Hanna. One of the most challenging scenes is when a middle-aged Michael visits a Jewish woman, who survived the church fire when she was a little girl and later testified at Hanna's trial. She wears a gold necklace in the shape of a starfish, reminiscent of the gold star she was forced to wear as a child. She says to Michael "People ask all the time what I learned in the camp. But the camps weren't therapy...Go to the theatre if you want catharsis...Don't go to the camps. Nothing comes out of the camps. Nothing."

The Reader, like most of us, doesn't know how to explain the holocaust. Germany was a country that upheld much that we trumpet about. An astute country with respect for religion, respect for democracy, went insane in the space of ten years. Overwhelmingly the sense that you get when watching The Reader is one of shock. The film is disturbing in its never-ending ironies. It refuses to leave the viewer with neat conclusions. The relationship between Hanna and Michael, so damaging, centres paradoxically around a shared joy of beautiful literature. Hanna is one of the most complex characters ever depicted on screen. She holds contradictions of vulnerability, innocence, beauty and vile behaviour, evoking both compassion and repulsion from the adult Michael and from the film's viewers. Hanna, a woman who loves beauty, who cries at the sound of a choir singing in a church, was also somehow able to watch 300 people in a church burn to death. Like most of us, the film doesn't know exactly what to do with those contradictions.

This is the beauty of The Reader. It tells the story of people who cannot ignore the Holocaust and cannot explain it either. There is a temptation to rush to explanations, shrinking people into categories they don't belong in. There is a tendency to try and contain our understanding of horrific events, in the hope of reaching understanding. It seems that in a society confused about choice, morality and what constitutes good and bad, the only framework left to explain human actions is the medical framework, reducing people to bodies and brains. When we have lost confidence in goodness, lost sight of people's capacity to engage their moral compass; all that is left is the asylum and the pill bottle.

Since the time of Freud the idea of the "unconscious" having an influence on our choices has been strong. The argument of psychodynamics is that our unresolved childhood issues and our natural desires, shape who we are and dictate how we behave.[4] While there have been valuable lessons that have come along with psychology, this mindset often leaves us puzzled about how much responsibility to ascribe to people for their actions. One of the most telling examples of this was the trial of Josef Fritzl, in Austria earlier this year. Fritzl kept his daughter locked in a basement and fathered multiple children with her. During his trial, newspapers around the globe reported that he too had a troubled childhood, with an abusive mother.[5] We are unsure how much responsibility to place on someone like Josef Fritzlafter all, he is also a victim. What of Hitler? Can his actions also be explained and understood?

It is right that we try to understand what leads someone to behave as they do. And yet this cannot lead us to believe that tomorrow is already determined. Life isn't fair, people's choices aren't equal, but they are still real.

The human face of evil confronts us in The Reader. Hanna is a woman who does not seem to know better, but who still must be responsible for the damage she does. At her trial, Hanna says she was just doing what she was told to doshe was a guard, she couldn't let the prisoners escape. This claim is met by the bewildered and horrified face of the judge who knows that we are responsible for our actions, regardless of how compelling or powerful a system may be. Later, in the scene when and Michael visits the Jewish woman who had testified at Hanna's trial, a beautiful piece of dialogue takes place. Michael says to the Jewish woman "Hanna was illiterate." She replies "Is that an explanation for her behaviour? Or an excuse?" "No. No." Michael's response is firm. He attempts to hold onto compassion without turning it into a justificationand so must we.

The Holocaust requires a deeper understanding of the human beingan understanding that doesn't reduce a person to their childhood issues, denying them responsibility but that also doesn't treat them as beyond compassion and alien to the rest of us. We must admit that Hitler was made of the same stuff we are. He too was human. It is easier to believe that he was utterly evil, that Germany was simply a rotten apple in the midst of a good world. What "The Reader" demands is that we see the rotten apple was a person who loved and was loved. It forces us to admit that people with enormous capacity for good, can turn that rotten.

None of us are born with a blank slate called life, ready for us to paint however we want. We are born into existing threads of history, context and relationships. But what we do with these threads matters greatly and we cannot give up on the truth that we have the power and the responsibility to sew our patch of living with as much beauty as we can possibly muster. What some of us have to overcome in order to do any good at all with our lives, to simply keep violence at bay, is extraordinary. But this is still our responsibility, difficult as it may be. There is mystery and pain in the fact that we are wounded people, but that we have the potential, the responsibility even, to face the truth and to love. The holocaust, the genocide in Rwanda, are exercises in dehumanising masses of people. The way we them is to hold onto humanity. To be more than a beast. To heal, to choose well, to tell the truth.

Our confidence about our capacity to do good is often attacked by a utilitarian belief that something is only good if it produces good results. Yet like the horror of the world, there is also a goodness that defies all logic. In New Zealand in 2008, a young teacher named Tony, trapped in a flooding canyon, strapped his student who had cerebral palsy to his back, to give him a better chance of survival as the water rose. They both died. The good didn't pay off in any tangible way at all. He didn't save a lifenot the boys and not his own. But his sacrifice stands bravely and beautifully, a testimony to the value of every life, down to the last breath. If evil is a reality, so is goodnessand we are poised between them, given a frail will to choose.

In The Reader Michael hangs an artwork on a wall for the now institutionalised, dishevelled Hanna. It ultimately seems like a worthless act as no one ever sees it. His other attempts to help Hanna get through life in prison seem naive at best, when we see that she still doesn't understand the severity of her past. Sometimes this squall of the world is too messy for us to produce tidy results. But goodness remains, eternally referencing our choices, demanding us to admit that even when it isn't complete and doesn't seem to trump the bad, it is worth fighting for. Michael's artwork hangs on a wall, unnoticed and forgotten, as testament to the humanity of Hanna, the humanity of Michael.

Standing with one another in solidarity and support is easy when life is pretty. Much harder when the world closes a circle of barbed wire around us. In these moments, the task we have before us is to hunt for a vestige of goodness within one another, to whisper its name and treat it as sacred. Compassion is heavier than we like to think. Compassion requires us to suffer with another, not simply to pity them. Etty Hillesum died at Auschwitz. In her diary she wrote "All that matters now is to be kind to each other with all the goodness that is in us."[6]

During the summer, I drove a friend to hospital to receive electric shock treatment. The aim of it was to try and snap her brain out of depression. It sort of worked and sort of didn't. She goes on trying to repair her life, smiling at shopkeepers, looking for beauty, after having copped a good few bruisings in the last couple of years. She is the sort of hero, like Michael in The Reader, whom we need. Not superheroes with steel skin and a fake world, but people who decide to face the world in all its truth and do what they can to heal. Michael's moments of compassion in a world that prefers to be numb, seem strange and heavy. Caring for Hanna costs him dearly. But his willingness to treat her as human despite his repulsion at what he knows, rings with goodness.

How do we live with the ashes of the Holocaust? A starting point is that we grieve. We sit in the ashes and we grieve for this storm we call earth and refuse to let anyone blur good and bad into anything other than what they are. We resolve to be people of goodness, marked by healing, marked by compassion, truth and goodness. Even if it doesn't work, and Darfur still seethes and the girl across the road still goes to prison, the goodness is not cancelled. Every obscenity, every degradation, every profanation, carries with it a challenge. We must never forget or occlude or explain away the wrongs that are donebut equally we must not cease to live, to endure, and to love.

Annette Pereira is Communications Manager at Maxim Institute. She studied Communications at University of Technology Sydney, and prior to joining the Institute, was working with "at-risk" adolescents.

ENDNOTES

[1] Fog of War: Eleven lessons from the life of Robert S. McNamara, directed by Errol Morris (Sony pictures, 2004).
[2] T. Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, 1.315.
[3] The Reader, directed by Stephen Daldry, written by David Hare and Bernard Schlink (Mirage Enterprises, 2008).
[4] S.L. Jones, R.E. Butman, Modern Psychotherapies, (Illinois: Intervarsity Press, 1991), 66.
[5] For example, "Fritzl admits rape, denies murder," BBC News, 16 March 2009, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7940564.stm (accessed 1 July 2009); L. Purves, "Josef Fritzl is the limit, the death of hope," The Times, 19 March 2009, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/libby_purves/article5934228.ece (accessed 1 July 2009); T. Paterson, "Josef Fritzl: The making of a Monster," The Independent, 3 May 2008, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/josef-fritzl-the-making-of-a-monster-820370.html (accessed 1July 2009).
[6] E. Hillesum, Etty: The letters and diaries of Etty Hillesum 1941-1943, edited and compiled by K.A.D. Smelik, translated by A.J. Pomerans, (Michigan: Eerdmans Publishing Company), 475.

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