While travelling to a lovely airport hotel on the outskirts of Paris for a business review a few weeks ago I stopped in a book shop and felt compelled to buy Their Darkest Hour by Laurence Rees. The book jacket describes the contents as follows:

How could Nazi killers shoot Jewish women and children at close range? Why did Japanese soldiers rape and murder on such a horrendous scale? How was it possible to endure the torment of a Nazi death camp?

Award-winning documentary maker and historian Laurence Rees has spent nearly 20 years wrestling with these questions in the course of filming hundreds of interviews with people tested to the extreme during World War II. He has come face-to-face with rapists, mass murderers, even cannibals, but he has also met courageous individuals who are an inspiration to us all.

It is an engrossing read, with the 35 interviews containing portraits of monsters who are now ordinary grandfathers and grandmothers, living their lives. Time and time again, the atrocities and sins of the past are explained away as a different time, with many looking back at the events as if it happened to a different person. At least, that was my first reaction.

The stories that shocked me the most were not the Japanese slaughter of the Chinese, Stalin’s atrocities or the German actions towards Jews and others. They are disturbing, but believable because they are well publicized and what we have come to expect. The most shocking were the Allied stories:

• pg. 54:  (US Marines)

‘We did not ever take a Japanese prisoner,’ said Eagleton simply. ‘In the two years that I was overseas I saw no prisoner every taken …. Once thirty or forty of them came out with their hands up. There were killed on the spot because we didn’t take prisoners’

• pr. 112-113: referencing the BBC2 documentary ‘A British Betrayal’ that Rees wrote.

World War II is looked on by many readers as a uniquely moral war – a conflict in which the good guys behaved well and the bad guys behaved badly. Indeed, in Britain it is almost the period by which we define ourselves: our values, our beliefs and our sense of self can all be traced in large measure back to those years. All of which makes it more inconvenient that there exist moments in this history when the good guys did not behave well – moments, in fact, when the good guys behaved very badly indeed. And the circumstances surrounding the handover by the British to the Soviets in 1945 of around 42,000 Cossacks make for particularly disturbing reading.

…. a reminder of a reality that we sometimes forget. Just because a decision has a catastrophic impact on thousands of people, it doesn’t necessarily need to have had any real effect on the handful of people who made it.

The final page sums up where I finally ended up, reflecting on the experiences of the 35 (pg. 278):

If most people’s character and beliefs are more susceptible to change with circumstances than we might think, it also follows that we have to consider the testimony in this book with humility. ‘That’s the trouble with life today,’ one former Nazi once said to me, ‘people who have never been tested go around making judgements about people who have been tested’ And whilst this sentiment did not stop me condemning this man’s wartime actions, his words did make me think more carefully before confronting the question: ‘What would I have done?’

In the end each of us has to decide for ourselves how we might change were circumstances to alter. Maybe terrible adversity would bring out the best in us, or, just maybe, it would reveal the worst. What do you think? What would you have done?

Reminds me of the story I learned in Sunday School where Peter denies knowing Jesus. And as one person said in the book, ‘I wasn’t brave enough to be a martyr.’

What would I have done? Humility, for sure.