Ruben Stam quoting philosopher George Steiner:

>He said something like: "One thing I have never been able to explain is
>how the Kommandant of a concentration camp could go home in the evening
>after a grizly day's doing, sit down behind the piano with his wife and
>children around him and play a Schubert impromptu."

I don't know the technical term for it, but humans have great capacity
to separate their lives into various segments where their mode of thought
and operation changes as they move from one segment to another.  On a scale
much smaller than the "Kommandant" example, most folks are not the same in
different environments - they adapt.

Concerning the Kommandant, perhaps the comfortable and serene and loving
evenings were his escape from the horror of the day's atrocities, and
without those evenings, the Kommandant would have lost his grasp on
reality.  Regardless, I'd advocate eliminating the Kommandant.  I doubt
his evenings have any significance to those he murdered, their families,
and their descendants.

Don Satz
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