While in prison, Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn reflected on his own experience in a Soviet labor camp.
Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart, and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. Even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained; and even in the best of all hearts, there remains…an unuprooted small corner of evil.
Solzhenitsyn admitted that being in a labor camp showed him how easily he could have engaged in what the camp guards did if the tables had been turned.
Confronted by the pit into which we are about to toss those who have done us harm, we halt, stricken dumb: it is after all only because of the way things worked out that they were the executioners and we weren’t….
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