Where Have We Heard That Before?

Every once in awhile, something happens that makes me stop whatever it is I'm doing and go, "Huh?"

Such a moment occurred today, when I heard about the admission by a 73-year-old man in Austria, who acknowledged that he had held his own daughter prisoner underneath his house for 24 years, had raped her repeatedly, had fathered more than a half dozen children with her -- and no one had any notion that anything was wrong in the household.

Apparently, the man managed to explain his daughter's sudden disappearance in 1984 by claiming that she had run away from home.

And then he was able to explain the sudden appearances of three of his children/grandchildren by saying his daughter had abruptly returned and left the children with him.

He and his wife got Good Samaritan points from their friends and neighbors for taking the children in and adopting them.

A medical emergency with one of the children who had been kept captive with the man's daughter exposed the "house of horrors."

And for the second time in the last couple of years, residents of a small, idyllic community in Austria, less than 100 miles from Vienna, were confronted with a case of a woman who had been kidnapped, held captive and raped for years -- and then the case came unraveled and the locals were left to ask themselves how all this could have happened under their noses.

I don't want to stereotype anyone, and I don't wish to be politically incorrect, but this sounds a lot like what the Germans and the Austrians and the residents of their satellites in eastern Europe were saying about the concentration camps at the end of World War II.

The camps were out there in plain sight. The smoke from the ovens was there in the sky for everyone to see in the closing weeks of the war.

Yet, when the allies revealed what had been going on, the locals all said, "We didn't know what was being done." And "What could we have done if we had known?"

The argument has some validity, on the surface. But if you dig a little deeper, there are some disturbing elements.

I know we've had some disturbing cases in the United States. Jeffrey Dahmer's neighbors in Milwaukee have to live with the realization of what he was doing in his apartment and no one apparently said anything about what may have been heard or seen around there over the years. Authorities were only summoned when the stench from Dahmer's apartment began to intrude into his neighbors' living space.

And there was the notorious case in New York City in the mid-1960s when a young woman named Kitty Genovese was stabbed to death near her home in Queens. Although she screamed and cried out for help, according to news reports, more than three dozen witnesses in the neighborhood did nothing to help her. One witness even reportedly opened his door and watched the fatal assault and never tried to summon help or stop what was happening.

I know it's hard to be sure what goes on behind the closed doors of someone else's home.

But these Austrian cases are disturbing for another reason. They're disturbing for what they reveal about the mindset in that part of the world.

There just seems to be something in the culture of that part of the world -- maybe it's an Aryan culture thing -- that frowns on asking questions when one's suspicions are aroused even slightly. Don't get involved. Don't know anything about what others are doing.

It's like the familiar line often recited by Sgt. Schultz on the TV show Hogan's Heroes. It's a prophetic line, really.

"I know nothing!" he used to insist. "Nothing!"

Edmund Burke is often cited as the source of a great quote, although I have yet to see a definitive attribution to him. Whether he said it or not, it seems appropriate to this case -- and others like it.

"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing."