Today I visited Dachau in Munich. It is the site for one of the
first concentration camps set up by the SS for the persecution and
extermination of Jews and other undesirables/non-conformists (political rivals,
communists, Gypsies, disabled and homosexuals). The Dachau site was used as a
prototype to build the other 25 major camps in Europe and to train the early
groups of SS men in the ways of inflicting torture and humiliation. My visit to
Dachau has left me with more questions than answers about human beings, but
first, I want to recount my experience visiting Dachau, so I can record this
for the future and so I too can bear witness......
Let me start by saying that our tour guide was a highly spirited
lady, let me call her M. M presented all the information with tremendous, yet
controlled passion. It seems M got interested in
understanding more about the holocaust at 15 years of age, because of the
influence of her history teacher… Makes one really think about the quality of
education we impart to our younger generations, for they will become
tomorrow’s Ms or Gandhis or Malalas or MLK Jrs or they might become tomorrow’s
Hitlers or Mussolinis or Gadaffis or George Zimmermans.
Coming back to Dachau, when you arrive in the town and as you
drive into the memorial camp site, what strikes you are the apartment buildings
close to the site. M told us that these buildings go way back and have stood
witness to the horrors that ensued at Dachau. Moreover, it also meant that the
people inhabiting those buildings and living in the town nearby KNEW what was
happening at this camp and yet chose to say/do nothing. Several women from the
town were involved with or married to the camp SS officers but they too were
either oblivious of the happenings at the camp or wished to know nothing about
it.
As you enter the camp site, you can see the remnants of what used
to be the “welcome building” used for inducting new inmates. M proceeded to
tell us of the cruel ways used by the SS men to further humiliate their new
arrivals – one of which included having a metal pin poke through the bottom of
the chair in which a new arrival would be sitting – to force him to get moving
so the next arrival could take his place( and be inducted) hence saving the
officer in charge the “labor” of saying “next”…..It makes you think of the
level of de-humanizing that had to have taken place in the minds of these
officers to treat another human being so vilely. Ironically, I only wish it had
stopped at that….
As you go further, the gate of the camp greets you with the
painful and cruel message: “Arbeit macht frei” – “Work makes you free”. I am
sure anyone can guess what “freedom” that referred to. Next M took us to the
museum which displays the few belongings that the inmates brought with them:
Pictures of a loved one, a post card, a letter, official identification
papers…Makes you think very bitterly about what must have been going through
the person’s mind as he chose to put that in his pocket. Unfortunately you
cannot help but think, what you’d take with you if something like this happened
to you and here is the really sad part, there still are people in today’s world
that are forced to make this cruel choice everyday….
Next we visited the sleeping barracks of the inmates. Small tiny
military beds lined the rooms. It seems the inmates were given straw to use as
a mattress to sleep on. Unfortunately, straw much like creativity, happiness
and individuality (all three of which the SS stamped out under its jackboots)
does not take too well to being constrained to a wooden frame. Punishments,
beatings and even death could be the result of an apparently “unkempt bed”..In
a place where humans were treated worse than animals, beaten on a whim,
insulted and humiliated beyond compare, pictures of shining, polished floors,
spotless soup cups and neatly tucked beds made me sick to the stomach.
Visiting the bathrooms brought a new horror. These bathrooms were
the sights for the most brutal punishments that often involved hanging the inmates by
hooks, causing wrists and/or shoulders to be dislocated, making the inmate
unfit for labor and hence fit for the gas chambers, which again ironically were
fitted with similar nozzles as the bathrooms.
As the tour finished, one thing became very clear in my mind….PEOPLE
ARE THE SAME ALL OVER THE WORLD. No matter how enlightened we might be, how
educated, how cultured and well-traveled, all of us are a little (or a lot)
racist, bigoted, prejudiced and broken.
Here are the two questions that have been haunting me since I left
Dachau:
1. How do normal people, people you’ve worked
with, neighbors, customers and classmates suddenly become perpetrators of such
heinous crimes? What light switch goes off that makes a person suddenly stop
seeing another as a living, sentient human being? It has to be more than just”
men following orders”… it has to be a much much higher level of mental and
physical buy-in. M told me that several SS officers were questioned at the end
of WWII, in an attempt to understand if they had psychopathic tendencies,
resulting in such horrific behavior. It was found that 95% of them were
perfectly normal people, loving husbands, dutiful sons, doting fathers (the son
of an SS officer who had visited Dachau told M that his father was a “good,
loving man”)…. These officers were just convinced that they were doing the
right thing, they were sure that these inmates were lower life forms and they
were happy to be doing what they were.
Slavery,
persecution of African Americans, Apartheid in South Africa, Caste system in India,
massacres of one African tribe by another…. Clearly we have learnt nothing and
have hence been condemned to repeat history again and again and again.
2. If indeed: "The Only Thing Necessary for the Triumph of Evil is that Good Men Do Nothing" then why did the “good” people not do
anything? My hypothesis is that some of them were afraid of persecution
themselves, but my gut says that most of them were happy about what was
happening to their neighbors and colleagues and acquaintances. I am sure most
of them had the others’ jobs/ shops/ businesses/ houses/ cars/ possessions
already earmarked for themselves… Jealousy and coveting someone else’s things
is a vile thing… it made spies out of comrades in the Soviet Union, it made life-long
friends in Pakistan & India (during partition) covet the other’s house….it
made informants out of neighbors in Kashmir, ensuring that the ones fleeing
would be forced to abandon all belongings and leave barely with their lives….Unfortunately
no world peace, food, water, electricity, houses, cars, riches for everyone
will bring an end to such coveting….
Mankind will
always find something new to covet, to kill over, to draw lines on a map over,
to build a Dachau over…………..
