this matter, however, is that on such occasions people give rein to their primitive, brutal, savage, and sadistic instincts. If you could only see the specialists among the crowd of onlookers! Even though many of them are thieves, spongers, porters of smuggled goods, etc., they never cease looking for an opportunity to punish others. Such a person [. . .] will take the effort to catch a starving beggar, who grows insane at the sight of food. [Such a beggar] does not care whose the food is. He does not care if he can take it or not. No, he feels nothing. He is hungry, so he snatches the food and devours it [. . .] it does not matter what happens later. But such a catcher wants not only to chase, grab, and beat the perpetrator—a former human being, now nothing more than skin and bones. Having caught a thief, he delivers a speech, threatens, and demonstrates his outrage. I saw [. . .]—it seems—a junk trader on Solna Street, [. . .], three times. He was the first one to take the law into his own hands and he berated the onlookers with such a cunning expression on his face, as if he were profiting from that. Apparently, it is a pleasure for him. And as he spends whole days in one spot, so for his entertainment [. . .] from a necessary public condemnation of a crime. Besides, the whole issue of taking the law into one’s own hands [. . .] is linked to many aspects of life.
[8] The eighth plague is extreme social or caste conceit. It is [. . .] but there are lots of such contrasts here. If you are in any way superior to your neighbour (or you think yourself superior and you tell yourself so) you immediately separate yourself from him, full of contempt. You ignore him, you look down on him, and you nod disrespectfully in an answer to his bow. A “singing” beggar hates and scorns a beggar who just howls and begs. The former regards the latter as somebody having a lower position on an imaginary social ladder. The former resents the latter over the fact that he dares stand next to him and compete with him. The former would like to remove the latter from the sidewalk they share. I once saw one of these street cantors turn to a policeman and request the intervention and removal of another beggar who was lying and moaning on the street [. . .]. [. . .] And so on. Obviously, Judenrat clerks and policemen look down on unemployed civilians. But it is not only a matter of ambition, vanity, or arrogance. The thing is, above all, that society has split into a few dozen castes, and that if people do help one another then they do so only within the same caste. Hence, the name of the plague: caste conceit. You ignore the fact that others die of starvation, suffer from oedema, or rot in prison. They are not “from your caste.” Solidarity—if it still exists, then
