Recommended by Dave Pell of Next Draft, I picked up this book from the library quickly, to my surprise as it is a new release. Less than half way through, I bought a hardback copy for myself, and a digital copy that I promptly gave away. This book is worth reading, I will buy you a copy, too.

This is the story of Witold Pilecki who, despite the name of the book, was "volunteered" (read: politically blackmailed) to go to Auschwitz to collect evidence of the German actions in the camp. The prison had not yet become the death camps it evolved into, but it was still a place of horror when Pilecki went in. That he survived as long as he did, and also managed to escape to tell his story, is an incredible story worth hearing, listening to, reading.

Sad is the fact that Auschwitz is glossed over in many history books, if only because it comes at the end of a school year, mixed in with the short telling of World War 2. Sad is the fact that people deny it happened, or worse, claim that the Jewish people are complicit in their own destruction (yes, read the Amazon reviews, and see how polarizing the book is, and how many people claim Auschwitz didn't happen, wasn't "that bad," or was "their fault," it is horrifying).

Actually, "sad" doesn't begin to convey the depth of pain for these things. We fall into horrors one small step at a time. We become used to one action, and the next doesn't seem that bad. We adapt, oh so tragically, we adapt. “Witnessing the killing of healthy people by gas makes a strong impact only when you first see it,” he observed.

And yet, one can see in the telling of Pilecki's story that there will be those seemingly normal people who say, "No." No, this is not acceptable. No, this is not who we are. No, this is not who I choose to be. No, I will fight this, quietly or loudly, discretely or overtly, I will resist this.

We also see that doing the right thing does not result in a happy ending. For this we cry, for all of these losses.

I wonder if I can get my older brother and my dad to read this book. They need to read this book, perhaps to bring them slightly closer to understanding how their beliefs carry them to these horrors.

I wonder.

I will buy you a copy. Read this book.

Poland had been one of the most pluralistic and tolerant societies in Europe for much of its thousand-year history. However, the country that had reemerged in 1918 after 123 years of partition had struggled to forge an identity. Nationalists and church leaders called for an increasingly narrow definition of Polishness based on ethnicity and Catholicism.
Location: 184

Witold disliked politics and the way politicians exploited differences. His family stood for the old order, when Poland had been independent and a beacon of culture.
Location: 193

Gawryłkiewicz told Witold to stick to marching on the roads, instead of the woods. They’d be open targets, Witold realized, but he followed orders. They’d hardly set off when a German fighter buzzed over them, only to return a few minutes later with half a dozen bombers that proceeded to attack the column.
Location: 261

His instincts told him to lie perfectly still but it was an agony to listen to the shrieks and groans of his men being massacred.
Location: 289

The truth was unavoidable: Witold knew that Poland had lost its independence once again, and that the question facing him—every Pole—was whether to surrender or to fight on knowing that to do so was futile. Witold could never accept the first option.
Location: 325

There was no sense in continuing toward the border, which was sure to attract German attention sooner or later. So they made for the woods, where they could stage hit-and-run attacks and maybe find enough like-minded souls to plan a bigger operation. Over the following days they attacked several German convoys and even a small airstrip, blowing up a plane, but Witold knew such attacks didn’t achieve much.
Location: 334

The city had held out for another fortnight after he’d left, much to the fury of Hitler, who had instructed his generals to darken the skies over Warsaw with falling bombs and drown the people in blood.
Location: 345

Witold doesn’t say much about his time in Ostrów Mazowiecka. He likely felt dismayed by exhibitions of anti-Semitism among the locals, which clearly played into the Germans’ hands.
Location: 377

The best chance of driving out the Germans lay in planning an uprising to coincide with an Allied offensive. Witold knew there would be others who felt like he did and that he needed to start building a network.
Location: 392

Killing squads known as the Einsatzgruppen preempted resistance by rounding up and shooting some 20,000 members of the Polish educated and professional classes—lawyers, teachers, doctors, journalists, or simply anyone who looked intellectual—and buried their bodies in mass graves.
Location: 413

Witold almost certainly noticed Frank’s official decrees plastered on lampposts around the city and understood that the Germans meant to destroy Poland by tearing apart its social fabric and pitting ethnic groups against one another.
Location: 430

[H]e also saw encouraging signs of resistance: stickers declaring, “We don’t give a damn” (a direct translation of the Polish idiom is: “We have you deep in our ass”) and a giant poster of Hitler in the city center that had sprouted curly whiskers and long ears.
Location: 432

“Why do you trust me?” asked one man.

“Dear boy, you have to trust people,” Witold answered.
Location: 483

In the meantime, the intelligence chief Jerzy was keen to crack down on Poles who had started to collaborate with the occupiers, mostly drawn from the country’s million-strong ethnic German community. The Nazis relied on such informers to enforce the racial order. Despite the claims of Nazi scientists that they could distinguish anatomically between races, the truth was most Germans struggled to tell Poland’s ethnic groups apart and needed informants to reveal the complex fabric of Polish society. Informants took full advantage of their power to exact petty revenge. “In every community there are people who had no scruples about ridding themselves of trouble or denouncing an unwanted husband, wife or mistress,” observed one underground member.
Location: 519

He had already written to Polish leadership in France of his concerns that the Nazis were deliberately stoking racial hatred to divert Poles from anti-German activity.
Location: 583

However, the British were cautious about publicizing stories about Nazi wrongdoings in case they were accused of propaganda. The government’s use of fabricated atrocity stories during World War I—such as the claim that the Germans used corpses to manufacture soap—had created widespread public distrust.
Location: 1,535

... leaving the running of the hospital to SS-Unterscharführer Josef Klehr, a former cabinetmaker from Austria who liked to think of himself as a doctor. He arrived at the hospital on his motorcycle and expected one nurse to buff the paintwork and another to remove his boots and wash his feet at his desk. A third administered a manicure as Klehr puffed on his pipe “like a pasha,” as one prisoner recalled.
Location: 1,673

Dering searched for the BBC, which, unlike the tightly controlled German broadcasts, was largely accurate (the British government had calculated that reporting the news, even when it was bad for the Allies, made it more credible and thus more listened to). Despite Nazi efforts to jam the signal, the BBC’s German-language service was increasingly popular within the Reich,
Location: 1,711

Commandant Höss had instigated a grim new form of collective punishment for escapes: ten prisoners were chosen at random from the escapee’s block to starve to death in retribution. (The first time this happened, Marian Batko, a forty-year-old physics teacher from Krakow, had volunteered to take the place of a teenager who’d been selected, to the amazement of those who witnessed this self-sacrifice.)
Location: 1,859

The SS had discovered that a shot of phenol administered by syringe straight to the heart acted quickest, and routinely disposed of a dozen patients per day. The SS physicians justified these murders as acts of mercy. “A doctor’s duty is to heal patients, but only those who can be cured. Others we should prevent from suffering,” declared Schwela.5
Location: 1,910

Hitler had not yet conceptualized the Final Solution. But he believed Communism to be a Jewish invention intended to subjugate the Aryan race and that the Jews encountered in the Soviet Union were therefore enemy combatants.
Location: 1,928

As the Dutch theologian Willem Visser ’t Hooft wrote after the war, “People could find no place in their consciousness for such an unimaginable horror, and . . . did not have the imagination, together with the courage, to face it.” It was possible, Hooft concluded, to live in the “twilight between knowing and not knowing.”
Location: 2,248

The T4 program had already developed special gassing trucks that pumped carbon monoxide into their cargo bays for killing patients who lived too far away from a gas chamber. In November 1941 Himmler approved the deployment of the trucks to occupied Russia to spare his men the trauma of shooting civilians.
Location: 2,395

The whole camp became gripped by the frenzy. “Once someone has reached for things that are still warm and felt joy in doing so, the bliss of ownership begins to affect him like hashish,” wrote one prisoner.
Location: 3,227

The truth was, they needed to believe that they had some control over their fate.
Location: 3,240

Witold winced. He’d come from the tannery, where work now included processing the hair shorn from the corpses of Jewish women in Birkenau for use as mattress stuffing and lining stiffeners for uniforms.
Location: 3,550

But it was also true that many nurses acceded to SS orders while secretly working to alleviate the suffering they inflicted with smuggled medicine and food. No one could say with certainty which deed rose to the level of collaboration or what constituted a moral act in an environment where survival depended on complicity with murder.
Location: 3,594

Witold lay awake that night thinking of the boy and was overwhelmed with shame. For all his talk of uprisings, he’d failed to act on behalf of a single child. Worse, he knew that this pain, too, would fade, and the boy become faceless and forgotten. He felt the same deadness growing within him as he thought of the murder of the Jews. He was surrounded by evidence of the slaughter in the tannery, but he struggled to identify with the Jewish victims. “Witnessing the killing of healthy people by gas makes a strong impact only when you first see it,” he observed.
Location: 3,640

His sense of emotional distance was underscored by the fact that the treatment of prisoners in the main camp had improved somewhat.
Location: 3,645

“We were enchanted by everything,” Witold recalled. “We were in love with the world . . . just not with its people.”
Location: 4,045

After two and a half years in the camp, he was unsure of the mind-set of the people he would find. Witold was confident that most of his countrymen still opposed the Nazis, but how many had been forced through hunger or fear or ambition to make an accommodation with the occupier?
Location: 4,057

Yet he struggled to find the words to explain himself. He wanted people to feel the righteous anger that he had felt upon arriving in the camp. But when he talked about the camp’s horrors to friends that autumn, they closed down or changed the subject or, worse, tried to commiserate. He didn’t want pity but rather understanding.
Location: 4,310

Józef, the father, was opposed to the Communists, but he had little work. Many of his friends were taking jobs with the new regime. He was tired of fighting.
Location: 4,768

Three hundred thousand Polish Jews of the once three-million-strong community had survived the war. Those who remained or had returned home were subjected to abuse and violence by a contingent of Poles who blamed Jews for the Communist takeover of the country.
Location: 4,830

But there is, implicit in the tortured prose that emerges, a recognition that the horrors of the camp might never be comprehensible, even to a prisoner like himself who had suffered within its walls. Perhaps this gave him a measure of relief. For what emerges from these passages is a sense that Witold’s orientation had shifted. No longer did he need his readers to understand an evil that defied comprehension. Instead he asked them to look within themselves for that which they could share with those who suffer.
Location: 4,847

Yet Witold’s story is essential for our understanding of how Auschwitz came into being and obliges us to confront how we respond to evil in our own time. Witold entered Auschwitz before the Germans understood what the camp would become. This meant that Witold had to come to terms with the Holocaust even as the camp was transformed into a death factory before his eyes. At times he struggled to make sense of events, resorting to placing extraordinary atrocities in the context of the familiar. But Witold, unlike most prisoners or the long chain of people who handled his reports between Warsaw and London, refused to look away from what he could not understand. He engaged, and in doing so felt compelled to risk his life and act.
Location: 4,951

Above all, he asks us to trust one another. Witold’s defining quality was his ability to place his faith in other people. In the camp, where the SS sought to break the prisoners down and strip them of their values, the idea of trust had revolutionary potential. So long as the prisoners could believe in the greater good, they were not defeated.
Location: 4,964

Okay, this review is going to be one giant spoiler. If you have not read the book, and plan on reading the book, don't read on.

Stop now.

Stooooooop.

Stop.

Okay then, years ago, likely a couple decades at this point, I read a science-fiction short story about teleportation. An alien race arrived at Earth with this nifty teleportation technology, and is willing to give us this technology, interface with us, grant us the use of this amazing technology, but they will still control it and maintain it. I vaguely recall the aliens looked like dinosaurs or reptiles, and the teleportation unit had some human that operated it. Both of these recollections may be wrong, but they might be accurate, unsure.

Anyway, the teleportation worked by duplicating the object being teleported. The object (yes, including a human) would exist in the origination and the destination points at the same time. When the copy was deemed complete, the original would be destroyed. This was one of the rules the aliens laid down: that only one copy can exist, the other must be destroyed. Breaking this rule meant the technology would be revoked, and humans would lose it. This loss would include losing the ease of visiting stars, losing instant (near instant, go with it) transportation, losing access to untold riches and cultures and other technology.

Humans were not willing to lose this technology.

From an individual being teleported's perspective, you go to sleep and wake up at the destination. WOW how amazing!

From an outside perspective, the original splits. The one at the destination has this "OMG I've been teleported!" perspective, life continues along happily. The one at the origination has this "OMG I am about to die!" perspective, and is killed. Normally the origination doesn't actually have this perspective because everything goes okay and after being knocked out, doesn't wake up and know she's about to die. She dies in her sleep, with the teleportation happening while she's out.

In the short story, there's a glitch, and the transportee wakes up. She's confused. She's in the original place, the operators aren't sure the process worked, and there are tortuous hours while they figure out if she was teleported, are there two of her?

Turns out, there ARE two of her, and the local copy needs to die. She's led to the airlock, all the while begging to live, thrown into it, and is spaced. The human operator who does this killing knows the consequences of not doing it, and actively kills the woman of the story.

Phew. That's the short story I read years ago.

So, when I started reading this book, I"m all of 20 pages into it when we learn about the teleportation in the book. And I think, "Fuck, this is going to be a duplication of that story, isn't it?"

Yep.

Which ruined the whole book for me. Because this was a longer version of that short story.

Except it wasn't. It wasn't the antagonizing build up of the "I am going to die, but I didn't do anything why am I going to die? Let me live!" torture of the short story. It is the hang-wringing, "oh, what do we do? we can both live you know," teen-angsty version of the psychological torture of the short story.

Which is to say, if you haven't read either this review nor that short story, this is a fun beach read. If you have read either, skip it.

Sorry to ruin the book for you if you were going to read it and didn't stop when I told you to stop.

Because of the Entscheidungsproblem, computers couldn’t make an original decision. Every choice they came to could only be based on data and algorithms that had been preprogrammed into them. That’s not to say computers couldn’t get new ideas, but every new idea they got could only come from remixing old ideas, or external input from other computers, or through human input.
Page 21

So yeah, things weren’t great between me and my wife, but we were doing our best. Well, technically, she did her best, and I trailed along behind, living off the scraps of her drive and success like a remora.
Page 39

Sylvia had always given everything 110 percent, whether it was our relationship, her job, or even planning vacations. She was the one who did the research, built itineraries, then told me when and where to show up. She was also the breadwinner, which I guess made me the bread loser. Some spouses might have been irked by that, but not me. I was content to take it easy.
Page 39

Shit always goes wrong when Sylvia and I go on vacation. We’ve always referred to these mishaps as adventures, because we don’t want to call them vacation fuckups. Besides, who wants to have a textbook holiday anyway? Half the fun is partaking in some ridiculous misadventure that you can later tell your friends over drinks.
Page 48

"We will save your souls; We will fulfill your pact with the Creator, your obligation to live one life and die one death."
Page 55

Aren't religions great?

Narrator: "No."

“So, what happens now?”

Corina was obviously prepared for the question. “Joel, this is new territory for me, and for all of us here at International Transport."
Page 88

Okay, so, this is entirely BS. The company HAD to have considered this possibility. Is impossible NOT to have thought of it.

“Why are you doing this for me?”

“It is my belief that, given the circumstances, anyone might have done what you did."
Page 105

Wow, leading with compassion? Now we KNOW this is a work of fiction.

But really, leaders and followers recognizing that perfect people do not exist, what a world that would be, eh?

"Corporations don’t make decisions; people do.”
Page 105

Hrmm.

*cough* Abdication of responsibility.

*cough* Diffusion of responsibility.

*cough* Mistakes were made.

It’s the centerpiece of our new world order. Unelected, undemocratic—you in the West no longer have the power to vote with your money, despite what they tell you. But I suspect you already know this, Yoel: that they control your lives through commerce, and that it is fine. Maybe even you believe it is better this way.
Page 110

Well... the best fiction has truth in it, eh?

'You could even jailbreak your printer, buy a Big Mac, and then replicate it for your friends—but it wouldn’t be the same—the copy wouldn’t be “signed” by McDonald’s. We humans place a lot of stock in originality—our culture has always focused on “the real thing” having true tangible value, and with molecular signatures, it has become nearly impossible to make illegitimate replications of anything patented.'
Page 119

Laughing at this one. No, our culture does not focus on "the real thing." Look at diamonds, we're JUST FINE having cheaper man-made ones than nature made ones. We just want EVERY ELSE to think we have the real thing.

I’m guessing if you asked anyone from IT about the moral implications, they would likely extol humanity’s well-documented historical grapples with new transportation technologies. When railroads were first introduced, some people thought the speed would be so intense, it would cause their organs to shoot out of their rectums. But folks still got on board.
Page 124

Today you are rewarded for asking your questions, they call you a salter, and they pay you chits. But he, in his time, he was punished, and they took his name away, and exiled him.” A brief snigger. “It’s funny how the devout pretend like they want people to ask questions, but really they only want you to ask the questions that they have answers to.
Page 162

“Bullshit this, bullshit that. You keep on using that word like it means something other than what comes out of a cow. It’s not bullshit, Yoel. It’s life.”
Page 168

“Come on!” I called up to him, really laying on the disbelief. “What could you possibly do that can’t be undone by someone else?”
Page 315

A short bit ago, maybe last summer, I bought Bob a book that he was considering for PALAC. He was going to read the book first, as the leader for any book group should do, and was a bit frustrated that it wasn't available at the library for a while. So, I bought the book for him. He didn't end up using the book for the book group, as it was considered too technical. The group, however, ended up using this book for their science book discussion that quarter.

So, I picked it up and read it, too.

Unthinkable tells the reader about eight different head / brain injuries, then discusses what we have learned as a result of those injuries. As a bonus for many of the brain injuries and lessons learned, Thomson includes parts of "how you, too, can experience this weird brain phenomenon!" which I found entertaining. The book isn't a difficult read, and covers a few stories that are common in other books on thinking and brain injuries (hello, Phineas Gage, the most talked about brain injury ever in American culture).

Most amusing to me was the story of The Jumping Frenchmen of Maine, as they were also mentioned in Wanders as a neuropsychiatric disorder possibly bacteria and viral in origin. Turns out, no, more likely it was a conditioned response, which makes the brain both our friend and our "enemy." Also, people are jerks.

It was a fun read, not technical, but a good introduction to brains on the outside of "normal," and the inside of "fascinating." Recommended.

For the majority of us, our most vivid memories are those that have some kind of emotional content.

...

They essentially tell the rest of the brain, “these events are important, remember them.” This in turn makes the memory of that event more easily recalled at a later date.
Location: 460

THROUGHOUT SCHOOL, SHARON CONTINUED to hide her problem from her friends and family. The seeds of condemnation planted by her mother at such a young age had clearly taken hold. I feel a wave of sympathy. Sharon is so likable—so friendly, funny and intelligent. I’m amazed she kept this to herself for so long. Sharon was almost thirty before her secret came out in the open.
Location: 880

“I’ve always been silly and funny because it misdirected people away from the things I was hiding. Everyone always said, ‘You’re always in such a good mood.’ They didn’t know that I would go home at night and cry.
Location: 994

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN COLOR and emotion is well established in the animal kingdom. Female animals often use the color red to signal hormonal changes in their body associated with fertility, for example. Certain male primates show red following a surge of testosterone in their bloodstream, due to aggression or as a show of dominance. Testosterone suppresses the immune system, so the flush of red tells any females that the male must be in good health to cope with such deficits.
Location: 1,189

... asked several men to have a conversation with a woman who was wearing either a red or green shirt. Men who spoke to the woman while she was wearing a red shirt asked her more intimate questions than those who spoke to her while she was wearing green. In another experiment, men sat closer to a woman and classed her as more attractive when she was wearing a red shirt than when she was wearing an identical shirt in other colors.
Location: 1,195

Evolutionary anthropologists at Durham University and the University of Plymouth wondered whether wearing a red shirt might exploit our innate response to the color red and so influence the outcomes of sporting contests. They studied fifty-five years’ worth of English football league results, and found that teams whose home colors were red won 2 percent more often than teams who wore blue or white, and 3 percent more often than those who wore yellow or orange.
Location: 1,202

In fact, across a range of sports, wearing red is consistently associated with a higher probability of winning.
Location: 1,206

Winners wear read.

Why Mischief's colors are red and whatever. Thanks, Doyle!

Dopamine is used all over the brain and is important for motivation and producing a drive toward things that make you happy. If you have too much dopamine, though, it can lead to disinhibited behavior.
Location: 1,723

As you might expect, when the roles were suited to their brains the teams performed best. But here’s the rub: this occurred only when the task was completed in silence.

...

When the researchers watched back the trials, they discovered that each person quickly took over the other’s role, helping them to achieve their assignment. In other words, complete strangers had spontaneously discovered their strengths and weaknesses and modified their behavior to get a job done.
Location: 1,789

For instance, if you come across a problem that you can’t solve, try thinking about it using the kind of strategy that doesn’t come easily to you. “It takes more effort to think in a different mode,” says Kosslyn, “but anyone can drop into any mode if you really try.”
Location: 1,796

It’s a dangerous misperception among reporters, the public and policymakers that mental illness is at the root of violence.
Location: 2,236

“Most people with mental illness are not violent toward others and most violence is not caused by mental illness,” says McGinty.
Location: 2,239

In 2006, Laureys and his colleague Adrian Owen developed a test to check whether someone in an apparent vegetative state could in fact follow orders, by inviting them to think about moving around their house or playing tennis. These two thoughts produce very different patterns of activity in the brain, which the team could identify using brain scans. Their first patient—a twenty-three-year-old woman who had fulfilled all the criteria for vegetative state after a road traffic accident—was able to produce the two patterns of brain activity on request. Later they discovered she was very much aware of her surroundings, despite not being able to move, because she was able to answer their questions by attributing the two different thoughts (thinking about moving around her house or playing tennis) to the words “yes” and “no.”
Location: 2,822

It was the first sign that tactile stimulation isn’t always necessary for us to perceive the sensation of touch—in some conditions vision alone is sufficient.
Location: 3,074

So how do we empathize without burning out? A series of studies, many by Tania Singer at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, in Leipzig, Germany, suggests we should transform empathy into compassion.9 We often use these words interchangeably, but they mean different things. “Compassion” can be described as having caring thoughts for another person—for instance, when a mother reaches out to a screaming child. “Empathy” is putting yourself in another person’s shoes and vicariously experiencing their emotions.
Location: 3,280

Our inability to understand our own minds is the price we pay for the ability to question them in the first place. Back in that first lesson with Clive, I was told by my professor that “if the brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn’t.”
Location: 3,526