And it's not clear to me Who is a beast now, who is a man. 

Akmatova's husband was shot for "anti-Soviet activities". Her son was jailed and sent away, probably to some hard slave labor camp in Siberia. But she did not know. With thousands of other women, Anna Akhmatova waited in a long line, day after day, outside of Ljublianka, the main Moscow prison, hoping to get some information about her disappeared son. One day, one of the other women waiting in the same line recognized the famous Russian poet and whispered to her: "Are you able to express our sorrow in ever-lasting words?" This is, she herself has written, the background to Anna Akhmatova's Requiem, a poem hard to read without tears. Every time some brutality becomes known, a spate of books and articles are written by authors and journalists who, sometimes, one suspects, want to exculpate their own good living and, possibly, their own potential guilt. But they are surprisingly unwilling to look at the horrible history of mankind. Who is a beast, who is a man? Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, our closest relative in history, disappeared some 30,000 years ago. Researchers now suspect that we killed them in a first-ever holocaust. Over the latest 10,000 years, tens of thousands of small societies have disappeared out of history. In the past century we have had Hitler's race holocaust of Jews and Gypsies, and Stalin's and Mao's class holocaust of four times as many fellow humans. Behind these dry figures is the sum of all individual suffering - of millions and millions of human beings, of men who have been tortured, of women who have been raped, of children who have been killed in front of their parents. What is behind all this inhuman behavior? Partly intoxicated by the Enlightenment belief in the ability of God-like planners to find "rational"

solutions to human problems, the leaders of Akhmatova's Russia, they said, wanted to create a "just" society. Lenin and Stalin never got the idea that they were but inflated bacteria, grown from a drop of water into human beasts. Neither did the many intellectuals in the West who condoned the brutalities. "You cannot make an omelet", they cynically said, "without breaking eggs". To realize their ideal, these communist gods created the greatest flow of individual suffering mankind has ever seen. There is a risk that the cries of the Pope in Israel in the year of the Jubilee, and of many others: "never again a holocaust", will prove to be vain unless we dig under the surface of actual brutalities and dare to ask the question of Akhmatova: "Who is a beast now, who is a man", or rather, "How much are we all beasts still, how much humans?" If Anna Akhmatova's poetry and her pertinent question on "who is what" can help us understand that even the behavior of Stalin and his likes is biologically based - an extreme of what we all have a bit - perhaps we will be able to control our innate nature - by intense cultural efforts, by individual education and collective legislation. Another famous female writer, Hanna Arendt, in following the process against Eichmann in Jerusalem, coined the concept of "the banality of evil". It is very valid! And we should, indeed, be able to control banalities!