Ingrid Betancourt and the human stain

This part of a NYT interview with Ingrid Betancourt jumped out at me:

But she also is trying to avoid describing the details of her ordeal, years of captivity in the jungle in which she was often chained, physically tortured and humiliated by armed and angry men, whose behavior, she said earlier, was "so monstrous I think they themselves were disgusted."

She wants to bear witness and testify, "but it has to come in the right moment," she said, her eyes tearing. Only a week after liberation, "I need time," said Ms. Betancourt, who was abducted while campaigning for president.

"It's not easy to talk about things that are still hurting. And probably it will hurt all my life, I don't know. The only thing I've settled in my mind is that I want to forgive, and forgiveness comes with forgetting. So I have to do two things. I have to forget in order to find peace in my soul, and be able to forgive. But at the same time, once I've forgiven and forgotten, I will have to bring back memories. Probably they will be filtered by the time, so they won't come with all the pain I feel right now."

Probably, too, she said, she would do so with professional help. She recognized the cruelty within the human animal. "I think we have that animal inside of us, all of us, that's the reality of how we are made," she said. "We can be so horrible to the others." She said first that it was impossible to judge others, then she said, "For me it was like understanding what I couldn't understand before, how, for example, the Nazis, how this could happen."

I don't see the contradiction that the reporter apparently saw, and expressed in this final line. In fact, my guess is that Betancourt, through her suffering, saw human beings reduced, and reduce themselves, to an animal level, and came to understand how anybody has that capacity within them. Maybe she's trying to say she understands the concept of "chief of sinners."

My son Matthew is interested in World War II, and was asking me how it happened. I was trying to explain the rise of Nazism to him. He struggled to understand how people could believe Hitler, and follow Hitler. It's tough to get this across to an eight year old. One thing I did was go to YouTube and find some clips of Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will," her astonishing propaganda film of the 1934 Nazi Party Congress. I showed a clip to Matthew (see below) that starts with boys about his age drumming at it. I discussed what it would be like to be in a society that had been traumatized by war, and what if a charismatic leader came along that told you that all your problems were somebody else's fault, and that you could be strong and powerful again if only you did what he told you? And what if everybody around you agreed with him? How do you think you would hold out in that situation?

Matthew found the actual clips of Hitler's speeches disturbing, so we didn't watch them for long. Actually, it was more important to me that he saw the little boys in the crowd at the rally, and to understand that he could have been one of them had he been alive in German at the time. There were surely lots of little boys with his last name, Dreher, in Germany back then who were in crowds like that.

But back to Betancourt for a second. She rediscovered her Catholic faith during her captivity, and it got her through the valley of the shadow of death. Not only did she discover man's capacity for evil, but also his capacity for holiness:

She always tried to keep her dignity, she said, finding solace and sanity in daily activities, some private, like meditation and prayer, and some collective -- "to give yourself stability in a world with no stability." She said she found some nobility among the hostages and the degradation.

"That's the magic of all things. You can have the dark side of man but you can also plug yourself to light and be an enormous light to others. And I think that's what being spiritual means."

Asked about her rosary, she called it, in humor, "an error." She said she recalled her father saying the rosary, but could not remember exactly how it worked, how many times she was supposed to pray to the Virgin Mary. "So I thought, in case it's not 10, maybe 15," she said, fingering the rosary's 15 buttons, from a jacket the guerrillas had given her.

God is personal to her, she said. "I know that I talk to him, and that he responds." People dismiss the miraculous, she said, and "prefer talking about coincidences," but "what I think about miracles is that it happens all the time to everybody."

Watch Ingrid Betancourt. God is going to do remarkable things through her in the years to come.

Also, watch this clip of the Hitler Youth rally from Triumph of the Will. It's awfully instructive: