Friday, 6 June 2014

THE EPITOME OF HUMAN EVIL


by Lendsey Achudi, HIA Fellow

            How can a neighbor whom you have known for decades turn against you during the one moment that you really need them? How can your child’s friend, the one who you helped babysit when they were toddlers turn against your child and call them “a rat”. How can your employees, whom you hired so that they can provide better for their families turn around and call you a parasite? This is exactly what happened when the Warsaw ghetto was commissioned. 

            We got the chance to envision even more suffering that the Jewish population in Poland went through on Friday June 6th 2014 when we the visited Treblinka extermination camp located about a 2 hours drive from Warsaw. To say that being physically present in a site where over a million innocent human beings were senselessly murdered was depressing for me, is an understatement. While looking at the remnants of the representation of the daily lives of these victims, I felt uneasy. I saw keys, cups, kettles and a few other personal stuff recovered from the site. These people who were exterminated were real. At some point in time, they lived their lives just like us. They were doctors, religious leaders, teachers, lawyers, community organizers, businesspeople and all they seemed to want, just like all of us, is to make the best out of their short lives and leave it a little better for the younger generations.

One big question that tormented me before I came to Warsaw was how did these human beings end up in the extermination camps? Then other questions arose: How did the hate propaganda by Nazi believers and sympathizers result in fatal action that sought to eliminate a group of people for thriving in their uniqueness? Did everyone agree with what the Nazis were doing to the Jews? If not, who should have prevented this from happening?
            When our Humanity in Action staff showed us a documentary about the Warsaw Ghetto and Dr. Tomasz Cebulski, our guide for the day explained the transition from life around Warsaw, to the Warsaw Ghetto and finally to Treblinka extermination camp, I began to understand that the process from hate to extermination was thoroughly strategized. From each exhibition at the museum to the next, I envisioned a tragedy unfold slowly yet so surely. It was all so vivid, so overwhelming yet that is a reality that can never be erased but could have been prevented.

            First, it started from conversations. Rumors abound about the Jews living and working in Europe. Those living in Warsaw were not exempted from this. Hate for the Jews was nurtured by popular opinion shapers in the communities that they were a part of. This bred hatred towards jewish people. There would be minimal opposition later when they were asked to leave their homes and head to Warsaw where a ghetto had been specifically built for them in the name of resettlement. They had already been ostracized from their communities and the ghettos was represented as some sort of alternative.

            I learned from the documentary, visit to Treblinka and our tour guide that life in the Warsaw Ghetto was dehumanizing to say the least. The Jews were deprived of their dignity. Food was scarce, sanitation was deplorable and security guards assaulting residents of the ghetto was commonplace. Disempowering sights of mothers cuddling their babies who had frozen to death due to lack of warm winter clothing became normal. Heartbreaking tales of a child tugging on their mother’s clothes as a way to wake them up only to realize that their mothers were dead were told as frequently as the sun rose and set. Unfortunately this was just one of the initial phases of the torture. The hate perpetuated against the Jews had led to them being forcefully isolated from the rest of the community. They no longer had free movement. They had lost much of their valued possessions during the move into the ghetto. Their neighbors whom they had shared their lives with for the longest time seemed to have turned against them. These people had done nothing to deserve such kind of treatment. Their downfall, in the Nazi context, was being born Jewish and being part of the Jewish minority in Europe. They contributed to their communities and were were more of an asset than a liability to the establishment. But then according to the Nazi, they were parasites who did not deserve the opportunities they had created for themselves.
 
            From these ghettos, all sorts of tricks would be used to ensure that they travelled to Treblinka without putting up a united and strong resistance. This would answer some of my lingering questions on how such smart and able people, who were aware that their friends and families were being exterminated in other cities would appear to have willingly travelled to these well orchestrated death traps. Turns out while being systematically dehumanized in the ghetto, they would also be brainwashed into thinking that their then situation was much better than it actually was. The residents of the Warsaw ghetto would be encouraged to surrender their most valuable property to the Nazi custodians for “safe-keeping”. Anyone that submitted their valuables would be given a token as a receipt leaving the impression that these items could be retrieved at a later time. Of course this was never going to happen but how would they ever know? They were not told that they were being taken to death camps rather that they were being resettled into labor camps in other parts of Europe. It was even more shocking to learn that many of these victims were made to pay the one-way train fare for their work deportation when really they were just paying for their own shipment to their miserable deaths.

These details made me realize that Hitler and his cronies were just as clever as they were narcissistic. They were not just crazy sick evil people as we would like to dismiss them as. They were human beings and the bitter truth is that any human being is capable of committing such acts against other human beings if they do not consult their conscience. At one time all these perpetrators were only seen as fathers, husbands, brothers or neighbors yet they committed insurmountable evil that no one who knew them before would ever fathom as even humanly possible. The bad news is that indeed, human beings are capable to committing unimaginable evils against other human beings.
 
Sadly, as much as we would like to deny it, these evils persist even today. As I watched the documentary on the Warsaw ghetto, photos from the current situation in South Sudan, Somalia and the Central African Republic haunted me. The images of dead Jewish bodies in the Warsaw ghetto are strikingly similar to those I have seen of mutilated bodies from machete blows and gun shots from South Sudan. The photos of the crematorium at Treblinka brought back all the footages from the lynching of children and women’s bodies in the Central African Republic that have stuck in my head. The Nazi swastika at the model of Treblinka extermination camp being exhibited at the museum reminded me of the extremist jihadists Al-Shabaab and Boko Haram’s modus operandi that made me feel hopeless about the situations of innocent people who are falling victim of their murderous sprees everyday.


Ultimately what really got me thinking is if one day history will judge me a by-stander in what is happening in South Sudan, Syria, Somalia, Central African Republic and if there is anything I could do to help avert the crises. Am I doing enough? What more could I do? Is the situation even solvable in the first place? This experience at Treblinka really shook me to the core. Genocide is being committed right now all over the world. Clearly, we have never learned from slavery, the Holocaust, Rwandan genocide and many other similar events in our history. 

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