āFor the dead and the living ā we must bear witnessā
Yesterday, I aged by many years in a few hours. I had heard of love and hate, of compassion and brutality, of God and the Devil. But, the reality of it all hit me when I stepped into the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC. I knew then and there, that both heaven and hell are right here on earth and it all depends on what we humans want to make a place into.
The first line above adorns the entrance to this museum. Ellie Wiesel, himself a survivor of the holocaust, wrote that line as the credo of this institution. The line means that we all in the failure of our inaction, must stand witness to the horrors committed. The sheer vastness of the information and the sheer cruelty of the violence documented there force you to close your mind lest you go blind with pain and to open your mind, lest you feel it is all some fictional horror story.
At the beginning of this museum, they offer you to pick up an identification card belonging to one of the victims killed in the holocaust. This person on the identity card is your first and most shocking introduction to what is coming as you walk through the dark walkways of the museum. The card that I picked up was of Henoch Kornfeld. This child was born in the year when Hitler invaded Poland. When he was a 3 year old boy, he and his mother and father were taken by the Germans to a concentration camp. At the age of 3, this little boy was mercilessly gassed and put to death.
What goes through your mind when you read that identity card? Do you read it as a chip of the past? Or may be a little sad story? Do you treat it simply as a statistic? Or do you actually feel that little boy inside your mind, see the world through his eyes, hear his small pitiful cries for mercy and feel the world go dark slowly through hunger, torture and the smell of death in the concentration camp till your last vision of this cruel world is of your mum and dad dying besides you in that hell-hole of a gas chamber?
My three hour walk through that museum began with this shocking vision that hung in my mind.
The museum takes u through the entire decades of 1930ās and then 1940ās in a very riveting fashion. The displays, videos, audio clips, factual stories, artifacts, newspaper clippings, speeches, real life concentration camp relics, torture equipments usedā¦ all these bring that time and those horrible sufferings so shockingly close to you that you can almost hear the echoes of a failed humanity.
The Europe of 1933 was certainly a hell. In the museum, I watched two videos in the mini-theater which give the visitor a pre-amble to how things began before the holocaust. The Great Depression of the western economy in 1929 reduced huge chunks of the German population into beggars. The treaty of Versailles after World War I had already broken their back, and this depression ruined them further. At such times of ruin, Adolf Hitler began his propaganda of how he can bring Germany its old glory if his Nazi party was to form the Third Reich. Though initially ignored by the majority of the population, Hitler had gathered enough support by 1933 to stand for and win the election as the Chancellor of Germany.
With his rise to power began the āhellificationā of Germany. With each passing year, Germany crossed landmarks that took it into such depths as no country has ever witnessed. The museum has sections dedicated to how the life in Germany changed from 1934 to 1945. The pictures, posters, written and published documents accumulated over decades tell a story the likes of which have never been told in the long annals of mankindās existence. Not because no other period has been as well documented, but because no other period qualifies to be called the absolute debasement of the collective human consciousness.
Hitler began his systematic annihilation of the Jews and Roma (gypsy) of Germany in 1934. First, he declared Jews and Roma as not being citizens of Germany. They had to carry special identification declaring them to be Jews. After banning them from doing any kind of business, Hitler declared his āFinal Solutionā to the āProblem of the Jewsā in the country. He decided to segregate them into special camps so as to no pollute the society with their presence. He declared the Jews to be a curse, an abomination on the German society. He proclaimed that the only way to ensure Germany finds success is to remove Jews from its society.
After reading these things in the museum displays, I took a step back. For the last two thousand years, one thread of continuum is racial persecution of the Jews. Surrounded by a sea of blood-thirsty hatred, the Jews have now formed a state of Israel. But throughout the last two millennia, Jews have been hated and persecuted by Christians and Muslims alike. Every major power in Eurasia has some time in the past either condoned or actively participated in anti-Semitism. Russians, Nazis, Muslims, Arabs have all butchered the Jews. What was their crime? What was such enormity of the offense that Jews committed which made everybody else their enemies?
In one word: Nothing. There is no rational or justifiable crime committed by being a Jew. Their religion does not teach anything bad. They condemn violence just like us; they proclaim the āone-Godā notion of the Almighty and they claim to be the righteous path to God just like every other religion in the world. Thatās the truth. The only two crimes they committed were that they never had a country of their own (till Israel was formed) and that they were much more successful in business, education and industry than any other people of any other race in any European country. They were the banks of Europe and you would be surprised to know that prior to 1933, 11 out of Germanyās 37 Nobel Prize winners were Jewish! (Albert Einstein was a Jew in case you missed that part of history)
All these contributions to the society notwithstanding, Hitler began racial persecution against the Jews. As I walked through a section that portrays the concentration camps, I saw a train compartment on rails placed in the center of that room. This was an actual real train compartment from one of the trains that Germans used to transport the Jews into the concentration camps. Entire villages, towns and cities were emptied of Jews who were dumped into these trains. The compartment I saw there was about half the size of our normal metro train compartment. The plaque below it stated that the Germans filled these compartments with over 200 Jews at a time. These were really very poorly built compartments, with wooden planks for walls with gaps in them for windows. During winter, when they transported the Jews, many of them died simply of exposure to biting cold. They purposely moved these trains very slowly. The 200 souls locked in these compartments were not given food or water or even an outlet for human waste. For 4-6 weeks, they were kept moving at slow pace in these filthy conditions. When the doors opened, about half of them were dead due to cold, disease or just plain hunger. The remaining people were then exposed to the full horrors of the concentration camp.
If this description wasnāt enough, the actual concentration camp was unbearable. Without food or water, the Jews were made to do enormous manual labor. Day after day, for years on end, they were exposed to this first torture technique: death by sheer exhaustion. Those who survived this were led into various other torture methods. Killing for medical experiments, chopping off limbs to kill by pain, gas chambers, firing squad, hanging, forceful drowningā¦ I could not believe what my eyes were seeing in that museum.
Within a period of 6 years, the Nazis killed 6 million Jews in this fashion. In the most efficient decimation campaigns in the history of mankind, the Germans killed 1 million Jews per year. And the world watched. Watched and did nothing.
It was only and only when Hitler attacked France that the other European powers woke up to take action. The cries of 6 million people were not enough to wake up these so called Super Powers. It is to this atrophy of human action that we must now bear witness.
As I walked out of the museums doors into the evening mellow sunshine of Washington, D.C., I could not shake off thoughts of those people. Those people who made that journey in those trains and then suffered endless torture from fellow humans. Many times, we all complain and grumble about some things not going well in our lives. But just think about those people. Imagine how low and how basic their wants were. Their demands had gone down to so fundamental a level, that we cannot even imagine it. They were actually crying for a gulp of water or a morsel of food or just plain death so that they may escape from the endless torture.
It has been decades since then. But one thing is for sure. The West lost any moral ascendancy that it claimed over the world.
āEven passivity was a form of resistance. To die with dignity was a form of resistance. To resist the demoralizing, brutalizing force of evil, to refuse to be reduced to the level of animals, to live through the torment, to outlive the tormentors, these too were acts of resistance. Merely to give a witness of these events in testimony was, in the end, a contribution to victory. Simply to survive was a victory of the human spirit.ā
ā Martin Gilbert, The Holocaust: The Jewish Tragedy
