According to James Fussell, Executive Director of Genocide Watch, the role played by ID Cards in discrimination against ethnic and religious groups, is threefold,

Group Classification on National ID Cards as a Factor in Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing, paper presented on November 15, 2001 to the Seminar Series of the Yale University Genocide Studies Program, http://www.preventgenocide.org/prevent/removing-facilitating-factors/IDcards/.

Irena's story then reminds us of the terrible risks entailed by any group classification. The yellow Star of David – forced on Jewish clothing during the Shoah – and “J” stamp on ID documents are the obscene symbols of what people identification could produce when it becomes “a segment of a destruction process”. Yet identification does not necessarily entail classification.

“Personal identity” means two separate concepts, namely that an individual belongs to some categories and that she is distinguished by other persons and understood as one. In other words, there are two different aspects involved in personal recognition, 1) distinguishing between individuals, and 2) distinguishing between sets of people. The latter is likely to be the real issue. Dictatorships of any kind and totalitarian regimes have always ruled by categorizing people and by creating different classes of subjects. When rulers want their subject to humiliate herself or her fellows, they create categories of people or exploit existing categories. This is for many reasons; from a psychological point of view it is easier to induce cruelty against groups which are somehow abstract entities, rather than against single, identified, individuals;

This is probably one of the reasons why prisoners in extermination camps are so often anonymized, say, to make it psychologically easier for their torturers to persecute them.

Pseudospeciation is a process which turns social and cultural differences into biological diversities. It promotes cooperation within social groups, overpowering the selfish interests of individuals in favour of collective interests, yet it also inhibits cooperation between groups, and it fosters conflict and mistrust. Erik Erikson, the great child psychoanalyst known for his studies on child's identity, was the first to use this term. He lamented that pseudospeciation produces atrocities and brutality. “What is at stake here – wrote Erikson – is nothing less than the realization of the fact and the obligation of man's specieshood. Great religious leaders have attempted to break through the resistances against this awareness, but their churches have tended to join rather than shun man's deep-seated conviction that some providence has made his tribe and race or class, caste, or religion “naturally” superior to others. This seems to be part of a psychosocial evolution by which he has developed into pseudo-species ... for man is not only apt to lose all sense of species, but also to turn on another subgroup with a ferocity generally alien to the ‘social’ animal world".

Erikson E.R., 1964, Insight and responsibility. New York: Norton, p. 66.

Rights and Identity

We are all victims of the illusory belief that personal identification per se threatens basic liberties, and infringes our private sphere. People are concerned that large scale systems for personal identification can turn democratic states into police states. Of course one can be legitimately worried about giving too much power to governments, but this is a general issue that does not directly concern personal identification. To be sure, any process of personal identification implies that individuals are recognized subjects of rights and obligations, and this could be seen as a limitation of individual liberty. Yet there would be no rights, no liberty, without personal identities.

It was the French Revolution that first affirmed the indivisible unity of citizenship right and individual recognition. Universal rights and individual identity became two sides of the same coin. Absolutist regimes worked through social intermediaries, while the new revolutionary, democratic, order was based on a direct, unmediated, relationship to the citizen. The French citizen became an unmarked individual who was no longer a member of a group but just an inhabitant of the French nation. The citoyen was not a member of a community, a manor, a church, or a guild. It did not matter if he was a man or a woman, black or white, Jewish or Christian, Roman Catholic or Lutheran, he was just a citizen.

There is, however, an important debate among scholars as to what extent all categories were really included in the Declaration. See for instance S.M. Singham, 1994, “Betwixt Cattle and Men: Jews, Blacks, and Women and the Declaration of the Rights of Man,” in Dale Van Kley, ed., The French Idea of Freedom: The Old Regime and the Declaration of Rights of 1789, Stanford UP.

One can claim her rights, including the right to be left alone, and the right to refuse to be identified, only if she is an identifiable subject, if she has a public identity. Even if one is identified only for being unjustly arrested, this still means that there are some rules to be respected. Personal identification always implies a sort of respect for the law (of course a law can be horrible, but this is a different issue) because it implicitly affirms the principle of personal responsibility. This is evident also in Irena's story. Irena's identity was not cancelled by Nazis, because she was not ultimately a Jew but Polish. She was condemned to be executed but she escaped and could hide herself under a false identity. Could a Jewish person have done just the same? The answer is no, because Jews had not only to hide their personal identity, but also their group identity. In other words, Irena was persecuted according to any rule of law – although the law was obscene and unjust – she was not denied her citizen's rights, while these rights were simply cancelled for Jewish people.

In ancient Greece, slaves were called “faceless”, aprosopon. The word that in Greek designates the face, prosopon, is also at the origin of the Latin word persona, person. The person is thus an individual with a face, this is to say, out of metaphor, that one becomes a person when she is identifiable. In modern terms, one could say that you are who your papers say you are. Take away those papers and you have no claimable rights.

Ironically enough, the Greek definition for slaves was echoed a few years ago by the French controversial legislation on aliens, called sans-papiers (the paperless), who originate primarily from poor African nations.

The Pages of Testimony

There was however, also another, deeper reason why Irena struggled to preserve identities of Jewish children. Not only because there would be no rights without personal identities, but also because there would not be family ties without names. We would lose our deepest roots without our names because they are more than simply identifiers. Names have to do with our inner humanity. It is not by chance that according to the Bible the first task that God gave to Adam (Genesis 2:19) was to name all species of creation.

The reader of the Iliad probably remembers the famous episode when Diomed encounters Glaucus on the battle-field and Diomed asks him who he is. Glaucus, a young warrior without any hope of surviving the fight against the noble and powerful Diomed, answers “Why ask me of my lineage? Men come and go as leaves year by year upon the trees. Those of autumn the wind sheds upon the ground, but when spring returns the forest buds forth with fresh vines. Even so is it with the generations of mankind, the new spring up as the old are passing away. If, then, you would learn my descent, it is one that is well known to many. There is a city in the heart of Argos …”. There is in Glaucus' words the harrowing consciousness that nothing is permanent and that even the pride of belonging to a noble lineage is probably an illusion. Yet, for one of those reversals that are the secret of great poetry, this melancholic poem to human caducity becomes a compassionate praise of all humankind. Diomed was once hosted by Glaucus' family and when the expert warrior recognizes it, he gives up crossing his sword with the young man, who had his life saved by his name.

Names crystallize history and stories, they are symbols that remind us that each one of us is the point of arrival of generations of men who lived, dreamt, loved, suffered, and deluded themselves before us. Names hold human history and are the hallmark of culture on the natural, merely biological, flow of human generations. They are what link humans both vertically – through generations – and horizontally – across families and communities. Without their names Jewish children rescued by Irena would have been deprived of their cultural identity, they would have become those naked bodies of which Agamben, the Italian philosopher, speaks.

Agamben G, 2004, “No To Bio-Political Tattooing.” From: La Monde, 10 January 2004. Retrieved From www.Infoshop.Org/Inews/Stories.Php?Story=04/01/17/2017978> Accessed 20 November 2004.