The Torment of Others

It was in April 2010, if I recall precisely, when I was one of the two selected students to represent my college to an exploration of the remaining sites of perhaps the most infamous of concentration camps worldwide, Auschwitz-Birkenau. I remember that our speaker for that year was a frail, but spiritually robust, Kitty Hart-Moxen. It is a wretched matter in which one can reflect and account, in a morally tactful way, the very manifestation of such a sight where the surrounding fixtures are hauntingly silent and where even birds wilfully conclude that the grounds won't make a suitable pit-stop. Is it a holiday camp? Of course it's not. Can I summarise my experience as 'fun'? The thought would seem absurd. Even as a vague response of 'enlightening', it still seems impishly degrading of the entire event.
It was much to my surprise this week that after my visit had become a distant memory that an email was sent and, with shameful admission, that I had neglected the role as an 'ambassador' as my academic studies took greater precedent than that of other matters in the world. In defence of this though, the Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD), which is on the 27th January annually, is not about the individuals who have lived peacefully and able to take advantage of all of life's benefits, but those who had the opportunities wrenched away from them so callously that is the focus here. Some of the views you may not agree with here on this page today, for although the subject of remembrance and resistance against discriminatory hatred is a subject worthy of any discussion, there is a need for a harsh reminder that we spoke 'never again' after 1945, history still has a way of inexplicably repeating itself in the past and present.

After I had returned home and once again began to readjust to the regular routine for revising the summer exams that year, I wrote twelve poems in the limited spare time that was available to me. One of the subjects that I engaged with was Soviet Russia and how, after so many captured Russians had bore the brunt of the worse of Nazi excesses, were to return to an even worse fate than that of the suffering which would break any human soul, were heinously sent to Stalin's GULAG system. How ironic that the Red Army should be the first to liberate the Nazi camps in Polish grounds, only later to send them back again in a horrible combination of Siberia winters and punishing labour. Reason you ask? Stalin's paranoia had hit exponential heights and his anti-fascist politics had led him to believe that his own population would return to Russia with ideas of democracy and reform. The numbers which persihed were far greater than that of Nazi Germany, Bosnia and Rwanda by his death in 1953. The theme of 'Speak up, Speak out' for the trust is an apt title and though we remember the sufferings of the countries mentioned above, the extremes of the Communist left were no better than that of the barbaric right wing extremists which most often commit these extremes. The Jewish in Russia, which though many are not so aware of this, experienced even greater torture under the Tsarist Autocrats of Russia. Even under the last Tsar, Nicholas II, his inherited anti-semitism had led him to persecute the population after 1905, to which he personally blamed them for the shaken threat to his power over all of Russia. If Germany has since learned its lessons post-1945, Russia certainly did not and their choice hatred of classes of race, religion etc. was matched when Stalin attempted his final slaughter in the Jewish Doctors Plot. It was only his death and later reform by successive leaders which stopped this horrific execution taking place.

This is just one example where even after the torment of innocent civilians in the Third Reich has still perpetuated itself in other civilisations and states. Is there an answer why human beings like to prejudice and inflict pain on each other? It is a question which Darwin might have attempted an explanation of the primal instincts or Orwell observing "War is peace, Freedom is slavery, Ignorance is strength". Somewhere inbetween that might be a solution to that question, and even with words, besides physical oppression, do we commit assaults on equality and asserting our own ignorance upon each other. Why even does the bible, in Kings (17:20), proclaim quite haughtily "Therefore the Lord rejected all the people of Israel; he afflicted them, and gave them into the hands of plunderers." And in Proverbs (164) it uses the well known expression "Forgive and forget"? Can it be concluded that the God(s) people worship are anti-Semites and vengeful? It is little wonder human hatred began stem so early. It has since spread to unthinkable proportions and whilst it is important to remember those genocides in countries like Dafur and Bosnia, where its perpetrators are now thankfully unlikely to see the light of day in regards to their age, the slaughters in Vietnam by America, Armenia in Turkey and Algeria by France, are still answerable to crimes yet unanswered.

One only has to take a look at Syria, Guantanamo Bay and the inequality in middle eastern countries that hatred and injustice still exist all around us. And it is an appalling crime that hunger and starvation exist when there is already so much greed in the developed world, it puts us all to shame. Even those who we may regard as "terrorists" might be accurate for those who commit atrocities such as 9/11 or the attacks in Mumbai in India some years ago, those leaders who have been denounced by their own people and then shot, regard those who want change by the very same brand. Perhaps the ancient philosopher Heraclitus was right when he said "War is the father of all and king of all." No matter how the evidence still persists in places like Auschwitz, dictators and extremist parties (the so-called 'English Defence League' in this country, especially), we are all savages and monsters at heart. This is the tragedy of us all. It is in light though sometimes, like the upcoming campaign by the HMD that represents a glimmer of hope that some of the worst of humanitarian crimes can be resolved in standing against it. This post was the least I could do in support of this trust and I would only wholeheartedly recommend you look into yourselves also and judge by the content of somebody's character and not by their skin, to borrow a famous quotation.

Visit:
http://www.hmd.org.uk/
and
http://www.het.org.uk/ for more information.