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Introduction 11 also tend to simplify history but the pattern within which events are ordered is not always identifiable in a single, unequivocal fashion, and therefore dif­ fer­ent historians may understand and construe history in ways that are incom- patible with one another.”84 Prisoners or victims of a totalitarian and violent system, Levi continued, are forced to very often admit a co-­perpetrator status within the system of a POW camp, a concentration camp, or a destruction camp: a lager or a camp “on a smaller scale but with amplified characteristics reproduced the hierarchical structure of the totalitarian state, in which all power is invested from above and control from below is almost impossible.”85 The victims are eventually even further victimized upon accepting their sta- tuses as ­ those who existed within a system of torture and vio­lence: “We [the perpetrators, F.J.] have embraced you [the victims, F.J.], corrupted you, dragged you to the bottom with us. You are like us, you proud ­ people: dirtied with your own blood, as we are. You too, like us and Cain, have killed the ­brother. Come, we can play together.”86 Another ­thing that is impor­tant in the historian’s perspective is that we ­will never be able to reconstruct all the victims’ suffer- ing: “­There is no proportion between the pity we feel and the extent of the pain by which the pity is aroused: a single Anne Frank excites more emotion than the myriads who suffered as she did but whose image has remained in the shadows. Perhaps it is necessary that it can be so. If we had to and ­ were able to suffer the sufferings of every­one, we could not live.”87 Although Levi eventually emphasized that “one is never in another’s place [and e]ach indi- vidual is so complex that ­ there is no point in trying to foresee his be­hav­ior, all the more so in extreme situations nor is it pos­si­ble to foresee one’s own be­hav­ior,”88 historians should try to deal with the past to determine the ­ factors that could, but not necessarily coercively, lead to greater eruptions of vio­lence in war. Even for a substantial number of sadistic perpetrators who enjoyed killing victims in the cruelest ways pos­si­ble, ­there ­were always “unexpected acts of humanity,”89 although they ­ were rather rare. ­ Those who have survived geno- cide ­will usually become part of a “victims’ culture,”90 but how much it is accepted by following generations depends on the society at hand. ­ There is, however, also the danger of abusing such a “victims’ culture” for po­liti­cal instrumentalization. The same could be done with a “perpetrator culture” that would be based on a specific nationality and used as a tool of reprimand within an existing po­liti­cal strug­gle. When China, ­ Korea, and Japan strug­gle more than 70 years ­after the Second World War about the interpretation of the past—­rather than agree to prevent similar forms of vio­lence—it emphasizes how bad the overemphasis of specific memory-­narratives (particularly that of victim vs. the perpetrator) can be in po­liti­cal strug­gles. That said, many perpetrators choose to remain ­silent instead of confessing their sins against humanity and are often unknown.91 Usually, former perpetrators avoid being accountable and instead blame the po­liti­cal system or their own group