To grow up, as I did, in a country that had been under Nazi occupation less than a decade before I was born, was to be very sure about who had been good and who had been evil. Where I lived, in The Hague, we refused to buy candy from a local tobacconist, because the woman who worked behind the counter once had a boyfriend in the occupying German army. The butcher shop around the corner was out of bounds, because the owner was rumored to have been a Nazi collaborator. Most of our primary school teachers had been on the side of the angels, of course — or so they said. This one had been a brave resister by sending German soldiers, asking for directions, the wrong way. That one had punctured the tires of a German army vehicle. Whatever the truth of these claims and rumors may have been, the central moral yardstick with which we grew up was the question of whether a person had been a resister or a collaborator. It took some time for us to realize that people who had willingly collaborated or actively resisted were in the minority — less than ten percent either way, and there were far more collaborators than resisters. Most people had kept their heads down and tried to survive as best they could. If unpleasantness happened to others, to Jews in particular, it was more comfortable to avert one’s eyes. That way one could pretend not to know. For those of us born after the war it was easy to judge such behavior harshly. But it might have been wiser to heed the words of Anthony Eden, the former British prime minister, in The Sorrow and the Pity, Marcel Ophuls’ great film about French collaboration. He said in perfect French that he would not presume to cast moral judgment over the French treatment of former collaborators, since he had not had the misfortune of living under a brutal occupation himself. But even if one learns to be less quick to judge others, the experiences of World War II still cast a dark shadow and moral questions cannot be dodged, especially now that we live once again in a time of increasing autocracy, persecution, and violence licensed by the world’s most powerful leaders. Whether people can be classified as heroes or villains is less interesting to me than the question whether a person can remain decent in an indecent society. Is it at all possible, apart from joining the resistance, which puts one’s own life and that of others at risk, to remain uncorrupted by a criminal regime? What constitutes an indecent society was succinctly defined by the Israeli philosopher Avishai Margalit in his superb book The Decent Society. An indecent society, in his view, is one whose official institutions are designed to humiliate people, often a minority. A decent society is not quite the same thing as a civilized society. In Margalit’s words, a “civilized society is one whose members do not humiliate one another, while a decent society is one in which the institutions do not humiliate people.” A society ruled by Nazis, or Stalinists, or Maoists, or other rulers aspiring to totalitarian control, is of course more than just indecent. As long as one can freely express one’s critical opinions without being killed or imprisoned, it is possible to remain decent. The real moral dilemmas start when one’s livelihood, or even one’s life, depends on whether one is willing to cooperate with an indecent state. Where there is no choice, there is less of a dilemma. 
One choice faced by people in a dictatorship bent on humiliation, or worse, is whether to stay or to leave. Not everyone has this luxury, of course. Moving to another country is always difficult, and for many people unthinkable. Most countries will not let you in without money, documents, jobs in prospect, linguistic skills, and so forth. People who try to leave anyway often end up dead, or in holding camps under appalling conditions. And all this depends on whether you are allowed to leave in the first place. Everything was done to make it extremely hard for Jews to leave Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Once the Germans occupied most of Europe, it became utterly impossible. Less than a decade later, the Iron Curtain, which was not just a metaphor, was designed to stop people from leaving Communist states. These are practical issues. But assuming that a person is famous, or rich, or well-connected enough to get out, there is a moral issue, too. In the case of Nazi Germany, but also the Soviet Union, China, Russia, or any country under dictatorial rule, a rift invariably opens up between those who leave and those who, for whatever reason, choose to stay. Thomas Mann, who was hostile to the Nazis and married to a Jewish woman, fled Germany as soon as Hitler came to power in 1933, first to Switzerland, later to the United States. After becoming aware of the horrifying extent of Nazi crimes, Mann said on BBC radio that “everything German, everyone that speaks German, writes German, has lived in Germany [my italics], has been implicated by this dishonorable unmasking.” He went on to claim that all books published in the Third Reich stank of “blood and shame” and should be pulped. This did not go down well with writers who had stayed in Germany but had not been Nazis, who had tried in their own eyes to remain decent. The novelist Frank Thiess took Mann’s criticism personally. He responded by coining the phrase “inner emigration.” Living through the darkest times at home and shielding oneself from the criminal state by withdrawing into one’s private thoughts was surely more heroic, he argued, than lecturing one’s compatriots from the comfort of Californian exile. A similar conflict emerged from the terrors of Vladimir Putin’s policies in Russia. Hundreds of thousands of Russians have left their country; some, like Thomas
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