Please do not ask me to be in your shoes.

I read Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland as part of a senior-year anthropology class. To start a discussion of the book my professor asked, “What would you have done in this situation? What would you have done if you were a Polish villager ordered to massacre your neighbors?"

In asking the question do we search for some type of truth in people? There must be a reason ordinary people became murderers -- social pressure, the universal need to protect one’s own life and family first. Something, anything. And if we can empathize - if we can put ourselves in their place -- then do we not learn something about ourselves in the process?

But what if faced with a situation in which putting oneself in the other's shoes is an impossibility. I remember the taste of bile when I considered the absurdity of the question. “I cannot in any way answer this question." I began to say."I am Jewish. I would never, ever, EVER have been on the other side of that gun. Nothing in my 22 years of life has told me anything but that absolute fact.”

In an effort to make history relevant we ask visitors to “put yourself in the shoes of....” The best interpretations allow us to consider what we would do in a specific situation by giving us a set of context in which to consider our decision. But what if all of the context in the world does not change some absolute truths? In demanding that a person empathize are we actually marginalizing their own truths?