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Felix Nussbaum
Today I saw the paintings of Felix Nussbaum who because he was born Jewish was murdered at Auschwitz in 1944. My friend described how ‘we Germans’ had done ‘the worst thing’ by industrializing mass murder. I had never thought of it this way. Apparently Himmler watched a group of detained Jews digging their own mass grave and then vomited each time one was shot and tipped into it. His response was, we need to find a cleaner way of doing this; so the gas chamber was devised. (Why not, “we need to stop doing this”?) Standing in front of Nussbaum’s sensitive portraits and seeing from the dates he had less than five, four, three years to live it was impossible not to weep. We wept and choked and kept our tears silent. The museum gave onto neat German houses through a series of crooked windows, it is called the Museum with No Exit.
Afterwards it took a very long time to come to grips with my anger and fear and sense of terror and loss, with the grief, the resentment and yes, incipient hatred. I resented all of us for being here when so many sensitive and feeling people have died. I resented my own country, built on the backs of its own native populations and still dishonest about the murders in police custody and in jails. I could feel in my responses how easy it is to start blaming people and how delicate and difficult is the work of keeping one’s heart free of the pernicious weeds of resentment, envy, fear, and suspicion. How easy it feels to start to build on the seemingly empowering intoxication of self-righteousness. They, they, they. We, we, we. All the way home. Alright.
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Liberation of Auschwitz, January 27, 1945: 70 years. Not all were liberated.
The first concentration camps were initiated by the British Crown to accommodate the families of belligerent Boers in South Africa.
The US started their contributions with camps for first nation peoples. Eisenhower contributed at the end of WW2 with camps for Germans.http://www.rense.com/general46/germ.htm
The US continues its “development work” in concentration camps with Guantanamo to this day.
So it never stops. Concentrating on what happened to Jews and that it stopped with the end of WW2 is deflecting attention away from the development of an ongoing technology that modern nations are still involved with. Torture is ongoing. Murder is ongoing and its still being based on ethnicity and religion.
Gaza ?
“stop the boats” is our version of “cleaner”
It is what we can become. If we do not see that we all share the nature of human suffering we can become the monsters that inflict it; we become less than human.
More British enterprise : https://truthaholics.wordpress.com/2015/01/29/genocide-warcrime-remembering-indias-forgotten-holocaust/
Doctorwom Bhatt, I don’t understand the ungenerosity of your argument. Firstly, this response to the horror that was perpetrated here in Germany is not a distraction from the other horrors present and past in the world: the most honest response to Auschwitz is compassion, determination, a deepening rather than a shrinking of one’s empowered humanity. That’s why this story starts with the Jewish artist Felix Nussbaum and ends with the shame that plagues Australia. I am living in Germany where this massacre happened. Secondly, the lesson we need to learn from the Nazis’ death camps in particular is as this article points out, and as Stephen has reminded us below, to do with the commonality of the experience: we can each be pitiless and vengeful, we can each suffer. But it’s also to do with the peculiar coldness and passionless thoroughness Germans brought to their project: neighbours, teachers, human companions herded, stored, industrially slaughtered and their body fat rendered into soaps and their hair spun into coats. This idea that the horrors inflicted and sufferings endured in different places are somehow in competition with each other, that if we extend compassion to one we run short of that resource for another, embodies a fundamental misapprehension of how empathy works. If you’re worried that our honouring of one Holocaust impairs our ability to vigorously honour another I will point out that ‘compassion fatigue’ like the accusation of ‘political correctness’ is a very privileged-thinking and, as I said, ungenerous concept.