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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