The 1998 documentary The Last Days has recently been added to Netflix. We watched it tonight—I'm not sure how we stumbled into it, but the algorithm probably noticed that we've watched The Pianist and Schindler's List and The Boy in the Striped Pajamas and several movies and shows about Nanjing, so we get more Holocaust movies served to us.

I think I could understand it if someone said—prior to receiving evidence, of course—that they didn't believe such a thing happened. It's a scale and a brutality—scales and brutalities—that are hard to square with human activities. On the surface, at least. Below the surface, I think we see ourselves and the people we know and the people we don't know, and we understand. I think it's an unsettling feeling, this under-surface thought. We can imagine ourselves in any one of the roles in this story—any and all of them, not just the valiant and the dispossessed, but the aggressors.