The unimaginable
Tax deadline. But instead, last night when I should have been going through my bank statements I found myself sitting in front of the unexpurgated footage from the Russian Army of the liberation of Auschwitz. The culmination of several day of reading and conversations, about this and other things.
We think of ‘the liberation of the camps’ as a moment in time but it went on for months and months, and many prisoners were too ill to move, as we know. Others had nowhere to go. People stayed there for months, and several people filmed are named in the film. We’re used to these pictures being anonymous. The film sometimes just pans from face to face, people just looking at the camera. It’s incredibly powerful and the people are — as well as haggard, starved, dead-eyed — beautiful. You can’t imagine wanting to hurt them, quite the opposite.
Those who were well enough to work helped the Allies with the gargantuan task of every single particle on site had to be gone through: sifted, dealt with, disposed of. Every particle of the horror had to be engaged with — conditions to grim, so barren of goodness, so thoroughly ugly and miserable, that they show clearly how the Nazis had brutalised themselves.
We know how the Nazis with their relentless, procedural love of taxonomy had sorted all the people’s possessions out: there were shoe mountains, women’s men’s and children’s clothes mountains, a suitcase mountain, a pot-&-pan mountain, a neatly folded tallit mountain, a prosthetic limb mountain, a glasses mountain, and even a comb and a shaving brush mountain. The women’s hair alone, shaved off their living heads and then disinfected and sorted into bundles to be made into industrial felt and warm stockings for road workers, weighed over 15,000 pounds.
The chilling part — I mean, the part that was only chilling — was the contractual agreement between the Nazis and IG Farben, where a continual replacement of the worn-out slave labourers would keep their production steady. In the 1920s IG Farben had been the largest company in Europe — like one of our corporate internationals. In ten years it went from quite liberal to major Nazi Party donor, and purged its workforce of Jews by 1938. One of its subsidiaries made the Zyklon B gas and two others (after it was broken back down into its constituent parts) were Agfa and Bayer. (Forced labour under the Nazi regime was more widespread than just the ‘extermination by labour; that we hear about. It was a big, organised programme involving several grades of forced servitude, in which more than 200 companies participated.
So IG Farben knew exactly what was going on, of course; later, 23 of its executives were tried for war crimes, though only 13 were convicted and those were freed in only 1951.
I read yesterday about Witold Pilecki, a Polish resistance fighter (also a cavalry officer, and spy) who volunteered to be arrested and get sent to Auschwitz, to try to lead a revolt, to get information, to help people escape — he didn’t know what would be possible. In the end, what was possible was to organise a resistance — nearly a thousand men in the end, and only one of them a Gestapo spy — and to get messages out that described the conditions, which even Pilecki couldn’t believe. He was in there for three years before he managed (how??) to escape. He then took part in the Warsaw Uprising in 1944 and wrote a longer account of Auschwitz. It was for his activities in the anti-Soviet resistance that he was executed in 1948, telling the court: ‘I tried to live my life in such a fashion so that in my last hour, I would rather be happy than fearful. I find happiness in knowing that the fight was worth it’.
Ninety per cent of the prisoners in Auschwitz were Jews. The rest were made up of Gypsies, homosexuals, political dissidents like Pilecki, and others, from Poland and also from other occupied countries. The Russian army film doesn’t talk very much about who the people were, who were in the camp when they arrived. There is the whole family of an educated dissident. But although we know about Jewish uprisings, this is the first year I’ve seen films about what happened to the Gypsies. They had been rounded up too, in smaller numbers because there were fewer of them. They had been shot over mass graves, or in the street, or rounded up and taken to the camps, like the Jews. Dr Mengele partlicularly liked to experiment on Roma children. On 2 August 1944 at Auschwitz-Birkenau the Gypsy camp was liquidated: 3,000 men, women and children were gassed, and that was that.
Unlike the Jews, it took years — actual decades — to get this genocide recognised. There were protests, hunger strikes, more protests. It was the 1980s before the Roma and Sinti genocide was officially recognised by Germany. It was in 2011 that 2 August was made an official day of commemoration in Poland. I cried last night watching two Romany filmmakers put flowers on the official memorial that now stands in Auschwitz.
The Roma are still persecuted in small and not-so-small ways, that fly under the radar of the rest of us because we’re unaffected by it — just the way most of us don’t perceive anti-semitism, and white people couldn’t feel the racism in the recent attacks on Meghan Markle. The travellers’ way of life is legislated against and is being legislated against again, right this minute in the UK. (The consultation is very heavily biased; here is how to respond.)We — we all — need to think about what that means, both for travelling communities and for us.
A person I’ve just unfriended on Facebook, a man who feels just fine about his reasons for never giving money to the homeless (while pretending to be asking ‘what we think’), who posts plodding questions about things like rising mental health problems in the young, and who thought David Cameron’s ‘happiness survey’ was quite interesting, has just posted saying he’s decided he’s an intellectual. ‘It came as a surprise to me!’, he wrote. ‘It’s all about constructing and defending a proposition’, he said. ‘An intellectual’s first responsibility is to disagree with people’. A woman said something like, ‘You make it sound like a bad thing. What do intellectuals do?’ I replied, ‘Intellectuals get shot when people are being shot’.
When Witold Pilecki arrived at Auschwitz and everyone was being herded off the trains, an SS officer asked a man what his profession was. He replied that he was a doctor, and was promptly beaten to death. In the Cultural Revolution in China, you could be shot for wearing glasses. We know political dissidents in Nazi Germany were arrested, tortured, shot, sent to the camps.
Homosexual men, with their now-famous pink triangles, were regarded as a major threat to the way of life in the Reich. They were kept separate from the other prisoners so as not to contaminate them, they were given extra hard work to do and were raped and sexually tortured. They had a lower survival rate than the intellectuals and dissidents.
Lesbians were not homosexual, though — only ‘anti-social’ — so they wore the black triangle, along with prostitutes and other women who failed somehow to conform. Other groups who wore the black triangle included alcoholics, beggars, vagrants, and the ‘work-shy’. In the UK now there is a list, run by disability activists to keep track of documented deaths related to the DWP’s current benefits policies, which is called the Black Triangle List.
Weakness was a vice. We know disabled people and the mentally ill were persecuted horribly in the Third Reich — murdered outright, sent to the camps, experimented on. The ‘medical’ experiments on twins and others are well known. The small, pregnant, ill, frail elderly, disabled were selected for the gas straight off the trains. A woman I don’t know on Facebook wrote this morning, ‘They started out in hospitals. Then they went after the homeless’.
This horror was not the beginning. It was the culmination. I used to know the director of the Wiener Library in London, now the Wiener Holocaust Librarym which started with a sheaf of newspaper cuttings collected by Alfred Wiener, a German Jew. He started collecting clippings in the 1920s, and when Hitler was elected (we remember he was fairly elected, right?) the Wiener family went to Amsterdam. In 1938, Dr Wiener began making arrangements to leave for London, and his library opened on the day Hitler invaded Poland.
When do people start to think trouble looks like trouble? Who starts to think it? People who are deported for the lack of paperwork no one thought they needed before? Homeless people who find spikes where they used to sleep? Dying or blind or mentally incapacitated people who are told they’re ‘fit for work’? I’ve been in several conversations this week about ‘what we would do if this happened here’. None has involved mention of the detention centres where we keep asylum seekers, sometimes for years; Britain is the only country in Europe that locks up innocent refugees indefinitely. Or the homeless families being housed in disused office blocks in different cities from everyone they know.
None has involved events that are unfolding right now in the USA, which are germinal to me obviously because I grew up there and my whole extended birth family (aside from Welsh relatives) is still there. There are activists there who are being trained to safely accompany people to their immigration hearings; this largely involves knowledge of the law, giving the ability to resist the lies and subterfuges of ICE officers. Do we think the so-called Travel Ban (still in place, though it was a headline only for a weekend) is all right? There are plenty of people who don’t dare leave the US for a weekend, let’s say to visit their dying mum, knowing they wouldn’t get back in. There was that man in the news, arrested for leaving parcels of water and food in the desert for hungry migrants.
The list of groups deemed as ‘terrorist organisations’ under the UK’s terrorism legislation has recently been extended to include not just jihadi groups and Greenpeace, but also Extinction Rebellion and a cyclists’ activism group. I’m not expecting anyone to be prosecuted in the near future for going on an organised bike ride, but just think how many citizens the government will already have something on, if it should come to it. To say nothing of our social media activity, and our essays. How brave am I? No, really. How brave? How brave are you?
None of us knows how we’d behave in extreme conditions. We want to think we’d be heroes, but heroes are needed now too, and we’re alleviating our anxiety with box sets and wine. We know how we might behave if our temper was up, those of us with tempers. A hothead in peacetime is a hothead in wartime. But is our temper up? How far up is it? Would we have the nerve (or a place) to calmly hide someone? Many, many people did. I’ve heard of children carrying secret notes rolled up inside their bicycle handlebars. What do we think ‘Never again’ really means? What does it mean in a world where this stuff happens daily? where our Royal Family are friends with the House of Saud, who throw gay boys off the tops of buildings, who flog women publicly for going outside without a man, and who hang children? What about Boko Haram, what about the arms trade? Most of our chocolate is picked by child slaves.
What about the government’s new Brexit 50p coin, where Thomas Jefferson’s quote is bowdlerised to leave our the word ‘honest’? (The old Tea Partiers cut Jefferson completely out of a widely used American history textbook, because he wanted a separation of church and state.) We know the government wants to cut employment rights and civil rights when we’re out of the EU; they’ve said it. I wonder which clippings Dr Wiener would be collecting now.
And what about the NHS, then? I’m no better than you.
I’m haunted almost daily by about three minutes from the BBC series, ‘The Nazis: A Warning from History’. An old woman, Resi Kraus, is interviewed on a park bench about why she denounced her neighbour Ilse Totzke when she was 20, and is shown a letter: ‘to my mind, Miss Totzke is behaving suspiciously. I thought she might be engaged in some activity which is harmful to the German Reich’. Ilse Totzke was denounced by numerous neighbours before coming under surveillance by the SS, and was sent to Ravensbrück in 1943. Mrs Kraus admits her name and signature on the letter, but denies any memory at all of the incident or the document. ‘Why rake all this up after 50, 51 years?’ she says. She says other things, too: you can see the whole story unfolding, she is such a thorough unreliable narrator. ‘Ja? But it is you who is starting it’.
Nowadays (and she was only filmed in the 90s), Resi Kraus would be walking past a homeless person, or reporting someone she suspects of not deserving their disability benefit, saying, ‘Don’t bring politics into it!’ She’d be saying, like that man on Facebook, ‘[It] is difficult: there are “lies, damn lies and statistics.” It is hard to tell’.
