Belsen - Shame for All of Us
18 Apr 2005
[442w]
Today we commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of the day when the British army liberated prisoners held in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. The bald fact, that the Nazis industrially murdered six million Jews, is one which we repeat often enough to risk its losing its power to shock. We should make the mental effort to remember what it means, and anniversaries like this help us to do that.
But why should the Holocaust be so memorable? After all, we now know that Stalin killed as many as thirty million people in the Soviet Union. Other despotic regimes have also rivalled or surpassed Hitler. Other races have been the targets of horribly successful genocides. Yet we do not commemorate these killings so frequently and in such depth. And we are right to find the Holocaust uniquely shocking. Why?
One reason is that it wasn’t an isolated incident. It was the culmination of centuries of anti-semitism, a disease of the mind which keeps coming back to haunt us. But I think a key and often forgotten reason to remember the Holocaust is that German-speaking culture is one of the most valuable creations of human history. Bach, Beethoven and Brahms, Goethe and Schiller, and the huge creative power of a people to do wonderful engineering, to get things organised and working well: in so many ways Germany is something for us all to be proud of. And yet… this terrible thing was done, if not by all Germans, then by the German State and by many individual Germans.
This is what makes the Holocaust so terrible. It was done by the human race at its best – at its most organised, efficient and skilful, and by a cultured people with a noble history. We cannot pretend that genocide is a product of barbarism. It is a product of civilisation gone wrong. If the Germans could do such a thing, then so could any one of us.
I do in fact think British institutions and habits make it less likely the Holocaust would have happened here. We have a tradition of compromise and distrust for rhetoric and toughguys in office which we can be proud of, and which we should nurture. But these are national virtues. As individuals we have nothing to be smug about. If I had been born in Munich in 1918, there is no reason at all to suppose I would not have grown up to be an SS officer.
This is why we should keep the memory of the holocaust alive: not to remind ourselves that other people can be evil, but to guard against the evil within our own hearts.
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Bob Merkin wrote on 12 Aug 2005
I have been stumbling around C-space this morning and seem to have bounced from my original quest -- Stevie Smith -- to here. I do not find it surprising that someone who adores Stevie Smith is also hip-deep in the Nazi Holocaust and all the miserable questions it screams to be answered by all human beings.
Beauty and Justice are Handmaidens, Identical Twin Sisters. To aspire to the pinnacle of Beauty -- such people must also be hammering their pitons on the towering Flatirons of Justice.
Justice is perhaps too hifalutin a name for Beauty's Twin Sister; if Iphegenia's real name at birth was Betty, we should call her Betty. If the Nazi Holocaust has any answers for any human beings, then it is more primitive -- reductionist -- fundamental and elemental to call the Missing Virtue: Basic Human Decency.
In Yiddish the Virtue is compressed to "Mensch." Be A Mensch. In all your dealings, from the playground to the grave, strive to be a Human Being. Or, as the outraged Judge screamed to the Court at the end of a very interesting movie:
"Act like your Grandmother told you how to act!"
Admittedly -- obviously -- not a Very High Standard of Adult Human Behavior.
But could there be any Genocide in a World where 90 percent of all people scrupulously compelled themelves always to live by that standard?
Alas here I must disclose: Some people have Grandmothers who are lifelong screaming: Kill the Jews! Kill the Fags! Kill the Gypsies! Kill the [insert set of human beings here]!
So the Fundamental Grandma Standard will require some more precise language, to exclude the possibility of having had a Grandma like that.
But Mensch sufficies. Be A Mensch. Be A Human Being.
The word is the same as in German (Yiddish is frozen 13th Century German, but written in Hebrew letters), but I'm not a native German speaker and so I don't know if the ethical connotation attaches to German Mensch. Yiddish is dying, but drowns in nuance.
I am a Jew, born in 1947 and living most of the time in the USA (but I am also cursed with The Wanderlust, and so have been around the Block a few times).
All my sentient life, not a year has gone by, much of the time recently not a week has gone by when I do not encounter someone screaming or graffitiing in any of 100 languages: KILL THE JEWS
There exists a Thing more usually associated with the Christian belief system called Witness.
When scores of doors are being smashed down in the middle of the night and scores of your neighbors are being dragged away and beaten with rifle butts, and then are never seen again, when this is the Weather For Years in your neighborhood, it is Very Healthy and Proper to conclude that your Wisest Course is to Keep Your Fucking Mouth Shut and fervently hope for a Change of Regime in the near future.
But a Mensch -- utterly powerless to make any positive change in an Ongoing Neighborhood Holocaust -- can Witness.
And if she or he Survives the Holocaust, a Mensch then obligates himself or herself to make speeches to junior high school / middle school assemblies, speak at libraries, universities, chat to strangers on trains, ships, park benches about what she or he saw during the Holocaust.
Everyone wants to forget a State Holocaust or Genocide. The job of a Witness is to Remember.
There is among Jews a famous saying: Never Again. It has an incautious tendency to be misinterpreted or badly interpreted to mean: Never Again will the world do this to Jews.
But if the Nazi Holocaust (called ha-Shoah in Hebrew, ha- is "the") is to have any Meaning whatsoever, the meaning needs clearly to be: Never Again to Any Group of Human Beings anywhere in the world. The 11 to 12 million people who died through German state violence from 1938 to 1945 die for much less than their lives and deaths should have been worth if understanding of the Holocaust is so focused on that one event that we fail to make direct equivalences with state genocides in the Balkans, in Rwanda, in Cambodia, in Chile and Argentina -- and, lest this English-language primer seem a bit self-righteous, the European immigrants who took over these lands did so after a genocide of the First Peoples -- American Indians, Native-Americans. (The correct name for these peoples is less important than that most of them were annihilated, massacred, all were stripped of most of their lands, all who survive and linger are today vastly and, apparently, forever disenfranchised.) Colonial America and the subsequent USA until the Civil War also were constructed on more than two centuries of African slavery, a violent kind of ethnic and racial assault where slave labor and involuntary sexual services rather than mass death are the object, but execution and torture are liberally applied to maintain the slave labor economy.
And the UK -- its modern history overlies past centuries of grotesque military state violence and permanent disenfranchisement against earlier and subordinate peoples.
We would be historically wrong to over-emphasize the unique atrocities of state genocide with the Third Reich, with the German people. It happens all over the world, to scores of ethnicities, races and religions, many times in every generation.
I was a soldier. Shitty war, hated it, but we had a draft/conscription, and I got nabbed. And yet it taught me enough about the place of the Soldier in the affairs of the world.
How Terrible and how Wonderful it must have been for the British soldiers who first marched in to liberate the prisoners of Bergen-Belsen. For all the Allied soldiers and sailors who served during World War II and thus knew they had played some part, however small, in the final outcome of that war in Europe and the Pacific. But the Concentration Camp liberator soldiers, the Yanks, the Canadians, the Brits, the Russians -- they have seen Something, and clearly the only reason they were at those Camps on that day was that they were supposed to see that, and pay close attention, and remember it for the rest of their lives -- and then tell everyone who wasn't there.
The genocide perpetrated on the Cambodian people by the Maoist guerrillas led by Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge, was finally ended when Cambodia was invaded by the Vietnamese Army. Some estimates say the Khmer Rouge killed 1,700,000 children, women and men. In his last jungle interview, Pol Pot claimed those were Western lies, and said at worst his guerrillas only killed 250,000 human beings. People who wore eyeglasses (often illiterate farmers) were executed on suspicion of being counterrevolutionary intellectuals.
The Lesson (if there is one): Never Again for any group of human beings. Never Again for Rom Gypsies. Never Again for Khmer people. Never Again for Armenians, Never Again for homosexuals, never again for trades union or political left-wingers, Never Again for Muslim Kosovars, Never Again for Slavs and Wends, Never Again for Ibo or Tutsis.
Bob the Yank
Northampton (not the dumpy shoe factory town)
Massachusetts USA
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wrote on 25 Jun 2005