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Jul. 13th, 2007 02:19 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
frandroidWe spent a big chunk of our vacation to Vienna and Berlin, especially in Berlin, taking in WWII history. Hitler's rise to power. The gradual increase in anti-semitic violence, and eventually the Shoah. (Daniel Libeskind's Holocaust Museum, and in particular but not only his Holocaust Tower, is haunting.) Then the bloody War, and its terrible toll on Russians, which is always overlooked.(1) Then the Russians took Berlin, and in turn committed atrocities, including the Rape of Berlin(2). I visited Sachsenhausen, a Nazi concentration camp that the Soviets converted into an internment camp and ran for five years. In this camp the Nazis killed nowhere as many people as they did in other camps, but the whole system was modelled and run from there. They had their gas chamber, some other mechanism to kill people with a reusable wood "bullet", and a crematorium. Sometimes it's hard to take it all in; I was in a rather neutral mood while visiting Sachsenhausen. At other times, it goes beyond the numbers and gets to you: I've just broken down crying while writing this message.
And of course, it's never over. Human atrocity, I mean. I just finished reading this long and harrowing report in The Nation about the callousness of U.S. troops in Iraq with regards to Iraqi lives. (hat tip:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sabotabby) Killings so common and routine that investigating them all would tie up the occupation on itself. Constant home invasions by U.S. troops, based on false information. Another case mentions how the hand held up by a soldier, meant to say stop, can be interpreted as an invitation to move closer, when the trigger-happy soldier is warning the person to stop or get shot; how can they not communicate this cross-linguistic snafu through the chain of command, down to the ground? How many lives uselessly lost because 5 years into the occupation, soldiers still don't know what's a good way to indicate to an approach Iraqi how to stop and keep their distance? Can't they learn the word for "stop"? Is it so fucking hard to teach U.S. troops one word of Arabic, or one gesture?
I started comparing atrocities and occupations, going "Well at least the Nazis..." before I could stop myself. All these horrors make me feel quite helpless. Not me personally, I'm not that pretentious, but collectively... Everyone is waiting for Bush to leave, but is it enough? The callousness of the soldiers, while being a reflection of the decisions and attitudes made at the top, also shows some of their own (in)sensibilities. How do we stop this?
After Yitzhak Rabin visited the Jewish museum that's located at the Sachsenhausen camp in ~1990, neo-nazis tried to burn it down. The organization now in charge of the camp and memorial site has decided to preserve the burnt shell, to serve witness to this hateful act. Right by the camp, there are former SS training grounds, and many residences. We were wondering how people could live peacefully so close to such an atrocious location. We learnt later on that Oranienburg, the Berlin suburb where the camp is, is actually a hotbed of surging neo-Nazi activity. The local police are using the former SS compound for their own training, oblivious (I hope, in a way) to the symbolism. A tour guide told us that skinheads have handed flyers that deny the Holocaust to camp visitors.
I think it's pretty amazing that Germany is keeping all these sites alive and is facing its past, however imperfect those efforts might be. But the problem is not facing the past; if we're honest, we know that humans are capable of immense barbarity. The more difficult part is to face the present. I'm kind of at a loss for words at this point. We've paid the price of "just ignoring it" before. (And then paid it again in 1994, and again...)
I'm restless.
(1) The USA and Britain each lost about 400,000 troops. Russia lost 20,000,000, and then another 7,000,000 civilians. Who fought and won that war again?
(2) You didn't know? Me neither. From a Salon article: Though the precise statistics will never be known, existing estimates are breathtaking: 2 million women were raped in Germany, many of them more than once. In Berlin alone, hospital statistics indicate between 95,000 and 130,000 rape victims. Many women killed themselves rather than "concede" -- as some women put it -- to the Soviets; some men killed themselves and their wives rather than suffer the indignity of rape.
When they say "more than once", they do mean gang raped, and for some, gang raped more than once.
PS: if you have spotted inaccuracies in this post, I would be glad that you point them out, but don't mind me, I'm writing a summary of spoken tours given a few weeks ago where I was being showered with information, which itself could be iffy, although most guides took pains to say that their information came from academic sources. My mileage does vary.
And of course, it's never over. Human atrocity, I mean. I just finished reading this long and harrowing report in The Nation about the callousness of U.S. troops in Iraq with regards to Iraqi lives. (hat tip:
sabotabby) Killings so common and routine that investigating them all would tie up the occupation on itself. Constant home invasions by U.S. troops, based on false information. Another case mentions how the hand held up by a soldier, meant to say stop, can be interpreted as an invitation to move closer, when the trigger-happy soldier is warning the person to stop or get shot; how can they not communicate this cross-linguistic snafu through the chain of command, down to the ground? How many lives uselessly lost because 5 years into the occupation, soldiers still don't know what's a good way to indicate to an approach Iraqi how to stop and keep their distance? Can't they learn the word for "stop"? Is it so fucking hard to teach U.S. troops one word of Arabic, or one gesture? I started comparing atrocities and occupations, going "Well at least the Nazis..." before I could stop myself. All these horrors make me feel quite helpless. Not me personally, I'm not that pretentious, but collectively... Everyone is waiting for Bush to leave, but is it enough? The callousness of the soldiers, while being a reflection of the decisions and attitudes made at the top, also shows some of their own (in)sensibilities. How do we stop this?
After Yitzhak Rabin visited the Jewish museum that's located at the Sachsenhausen camp in ~1990, neo-nazis tried to burn it down. The organization now in charge of the camp and memorial site has decided to preserve the burnt shell, to serve witness to this hateful act. Right by the camp, there are former SS training grounds, and many residences. We were wondering how people could live peacefully so close to such an atrocious location. We learnt later on that Oranienburg, the Berlin suburb where the camp is, is actually a hotbed of surging neo-Nazi activity. The local police are using the former SS compound for their own training, oblivious (I hope, in a way) to the symbolism. A tour guide told us that skinheads have handed flyers that deny the Holocaust to camp visitors.
I think it's pretty amazing that Germany is keeping all these sites alive and is facing its past, however imperfect those efforts might be. But the problem is not facing the past; if we're honest, we know that humans are capable of immense barbarity. The more difficult part is to face the present. I'm kind of at a loss for words at this point. We've paid the price of "just ignoring it" before. (And then paid it again in 1994, and again...)
I'm restless.
(1) The USA and Britain each lost about 400,000 troops. Russia lost 20,000,000, and then another 7,000,000 civilians. Who fought and won that war again?
(2) You didn't know? Me neither. From a Salon article: Though the precise statistics will never be known, existing estimates are breathtaking: 2 million women were raped in Germany, many of them more than once. In Berlin alone, hospital statistics indicate between 95,000 and 130,000 rape victims. Many women killed themselves rather than "concede" -- as some women put it -- to the Soviets; some men killed themselves and their wives rather than suffer the indignity of rape.
When they say "more than once", they do mean gang raped, and for some, gang raped more than once.
PS: if you have spotted inaccuracies in this post, I would be glad that you point them out, but don't mind me, I'm writing a summary of spoken tours given a few weeks ago where I was being showered with information, which itself could be iffy, although most guides took pains to say that their information came from academic sources. My mileage does vary.