Not so ordinary "ordinary men"

Ordinary Men can be instrumental in understanding how horrific and how unimaginable the Nazi regime was. Had I not visited concentration camps and learned from survivors what they had endured, the mass shootings, the purposeless beatings, and the fear instilled would not be as easily grasped without a reading like this. My senior year of high school I attended a trip called March of The Living. Jews and others gather from all around the world to Poland where they visit concentration camps and learn with their own eyes what took place. We visited mass graves much like the ones described in Ordinary Men. Although before going on this trip I had learned a lot about the Holocaust, it was difficult to imagine what actually happened. I know what happened but still, hearing about it through teachers and books is not the same as seeing the evidence of the horrors of this tragedy. As I was reading Ordinary Men, so many of the mass shootings described, forced me to recall and picture the mass graves I had witnessed. One of the descriptions reminded me of a mass grave in a forest outside of a city in Poland. The letter in particular in the beginning of the book written to General Commissioner in Minsk reminded me of what I saw on this trip. In the letter, he describes all Jews regardless of age and sex rounded up and brought somewhere to first be robbed of their belongings. Next, they were transported to the woods where they were shot in a huge grave struggling to escape. No matter how many times I have heard of these brutalities, and even after seeing the mass graves that events like this left myself, it still shocks me every time. In the letter, he uses the word sadism to label the barbaric crimes he saw. These crimes were sadistic. I feel this is the perfect word to describe these merciless crimes. Sadism is the tendency to derive pleasure especially sexual gratification from inflicting pain suffering or humiliation on others. It is deliberate cruelty. How scary is it that so many "ordinary men" participated in inflicting deliberate cruelty and pain?