It is evil to forget
In 2005 the 60th Anniversary of the Allied Liberation of Auschwitz
(which was finally liberated in 1945), was marked, but the question
asked at this 60th Anniversary was whether the Allies had done enough to
stop the slaughter of the Jews. In Sri Lanka, Anne Ranasinghe will keep
giving us, in prose and verse, her chronicles of the suffering of her
people under the Nazi regime.
Her Holocaust Poems (At What Dark Point) and her recent collection of
essays, poems and two detailed papers by Klaus Harpprecht and Professor
Leonard Mars (A LONG HOT DAY) carry much of her outraged feelings.
Sanctioned measures
As a child she was Anneliese Katz, and wen she fled from Germany to
Britain she was 13 years old. Then, six months later, came the Second
World War, and she never saw her parents again.
In his essay on Anne, Harpprecht tells of how the people of this
country knew little about Germany and the Nazi period - 'about the war,
and the horrors that were perpetrated; nothing about the destruction of
the democratic way of life, the intolerance and oppression; about the
concentration and death camps; and the officially-planned and sanctioned
measures to commit mass murder.' Anne had to come to terms with this
horrendous past, and as the past returned to haunt her, 'it jolted her
into a renewed awareness of her identity.' As Anne herself declared:
'memory is our shield, our only shield.'
Jewish community
Anne came to this Island in 1952, and she now says: 'Looking back at
my beginnings and the strange turns my life has taken, I wonder to what
extent anyone is ever really in control, - Let me now illustrate, as
best as I can, what we should know about the Holocaust. It is an evil we
should never forget, just as we should never dismiss from memory the
evil of the JVP and LTTE atrocities that benumbed this land.
Until the Nazis marched into Czechoslovakia in March 1939, Hitler's
policy was to expel as many Jews as possible. Britain admitted a number
of Jewish refugees, and, after the horrors of the so-called
Kristallnacht in November 1938 (of which Anne tells us in A Long Hot
Day), there was an increasing exodus; till, by 1940 approximately 72
percent of Germany's Jewish community had fled the country. But with
Hitler's rapid conquest of Western Europe, many Jewish citizens of those
countries as well as the German Jewish refugees were trapped. The
invasion of Poland and Russia finally sealed the fate of millions the
updated second edition 2009 of a Long Hot Day (183 pages, priced at Rs.
500) is available at all major book shops.
Nazi territories
In the latter months of 1939 Britain halted all Jewish immigration
from areas under Nazi control. World-War-Two was in the offing, and no
country wanted to take a chance with a flood of refugees from Nazi
territories. In fact, Britain interned many Jewish refugees as 'enemy
aliens.' (Anne had to go before a Court of Law before being allowed to
stay at her school in Dorset, a 'Restricted Area.')
In his book, The Myth of Rescue (1997) William D. Rubinstein argued
that all countries, facing the threat of Nazi invasion, were justified
in this policy of exclusion. From 1940 onwards, Hitler forbade Jews to
leave Nazi occupied countries, and even those who did manage to escape
seemed to have disappeared. Neutral Switzerland sent thousands of
refugees, who with great difficulty reached its border, back to Germany,
to certain death.
The Arabs were also sensitive to this crisis. At the end of 1939,
Britain restricted the number of Jews to Palestine to 75,000. With
Churchill installed as prime minister in 1940, Italy also entered the
war and brought fighting closer to the Middle East. There followed the
tragedy of the refugee ship 'Struma' (carrying Jews from Romania) that
was denied entry to Palestine, and ended up torpedoed in the Black Sea
with a total loss of life.
Anne tells us how Hitler began to herd Jews into ghettos, then in
1941 started on a programme of organized murder. Churchill learnt of the
massacres as early as 1941, and of the plan to annihilate the whole
Jewish race by 1942, when two Slovak Jews escaped from Auschwitz to tell
the world what was happening. Let us take Anne's poem 'Report of a Long
Hot Day':
(Josefow, Poland, July 1942 Reserve Police Battalion 101-in
conjunction with the Wehrmacht, German Army)
Shady woods
At three in the morning we were ordered to gather all Jews in the
market place. Some tried to hide but we chased them out of their cellars
and attics and from under the floor boards. No one escaped.
We then loaded them into lorries men, women and also the children,
and drove them to the edge of the wood - (the woods are beautiful here
in Poland, cool and shady in the heat of summer) forced them (with
whips) out of the lorries and surrounded them. Then each reservist
pointed with his finger, and the Jew so chosen had to walk with him into
the forest where he shot him, returned, pointed to the next one, led him
to the same clearing and shot him too. And so on.
Bone splinters
It was a short walk they made together, the one who was to do the
shooting and the one to be shot, a few minutes to get to known one
another. Some of the policemen were familiar with their victims as they
came from the same town in Germany. When the Jews saw the bodies of
those who had gone before them there were screams, tears, prayers. Also
some resistance.
At first it was not easy for the reservists - after all, they are
ordinary men from ordinary families, and shooting people in the back of
the head can be very messy (they are spattered with blood, bone
splinters and bits of brain). But after a while they got used to it, and
in the end they competed with each other who could kill the most the
fastest.It was a long hot day. None of the Jews survived. - Carl Muller |