Lessons from WW II

Warning: One or two references here might offend religious people.

I was brushing up on the Second World War today on wikipedia with all the videos and photos included. I need to be reminded every once in a while what real horror is. What real evil is. And who can we blame? To what purpose. The evil is done, and can never be undone.

What exactly was the evil? I’m not directly referring to the number of lives lost, though that was unparalleled in the history of mankind. Even though approximately 60 million people lost their lives (about 2.5%) of the world population in the course of the war, that to my mind was not the real horror of it. There are many things worse than death. For a mother to have her baby casually snatched away and dashed to the ground without a change in expression on a guards face. For a young man to see his mother and sisters taken away to an SS brothel. For a young boy to witness his entire family being taken away in a vehicle never to see them again. For a woman to see her ten year old son have his hands tied behind his back, and then hung those hands from a pole so that both his shoulders dislocate. The true horror of the war was the systematic torture, both physically and emotionally of human beings by human beings, who had forgotten who they were.

How, I keep asking myself, can such things happen. How could the sky remain blue? How could the very rocks not cry out? How can time go on? Yet nature never seemed to care. If I was a believer in god, this very aspect of indifference would make me hate him. And if I were to ever find out that he was responsible – that in some twisted way, this was a punishment for some unknown crime – then if I were to ever come face to face with him, I would spit in his face.

The real horror of the episode is never brought out in history books. Education in schools only deals with the big overall picture. Who declared war on whom, in what year, and what happened. It never deals with what is really important – Individual suffering.

Indeed, suffering is part of life. What horrifies me, is the systematic treatment of humans as if they were not human. We do not even treat animals in this way. What I cannot really grasp, is how one can so entirely forget that the prisoners were human beings, with dignity, rights, minds and ideas of their own, and emotions that were not weaker for their having a different skin color, race or religion.

I hold that if the Germans were truly aware of the suffering they caused, they would not have done what they did. Hitler himself could not bare to see people being shot in prison, let alone being tortured, and having abominable medical experiments carried out on them. Several Germans complained initially, that they were unable to go on shooting Jews face to face. The extermination then became more mechanized and impersonal in order to not only make the process more efficient, but to blur the real suffering involved.

I’m in two minds as to whether or not people today should be made realize the amount of suffering caused. One the one hand, I am quite content to see simple people live their lives without knowing the depths of depravity humans can sink to. On the other hand, they seem so ignorant of what has happened, that they cannot see the warning signs around us that led to something like this happening in the first place.

In India, with various groups in conflict, political parties play the factions against each other, and resort to underhand tactics like modifying text books, banning movies and other literature, making laws based on the ‘Sentiments of the people’, and the like. It seems that the politicians in this country, have absolutely no idea of world history. They do not know that the above measures, were the first steps taken by the Nazis to establish their domination. They don’t know what they’re playing with. Truly ignorance can be evil.

And we can’t even blame anyone. It all seems so mindless and senseless. It’s enough to make a man despair. It makes me ever more aware of all the good and beautiful things in this world. Good that shows itself in little things like a kid enjoying his ice cream, and two lovers walking arm in arm. It’s only these little things that can save us give us hope. I’m unable to do anything to make the world a better place on a large scale. I cannot influence government policy, I cannot stop my people from hating each other. I have to remain a mute spectator while I see this or that policy being implemented which I know is evil. The only way to stop this, is for the people of this country to be educated about what happened in the past. Not textbook history. Real history of people, and individual lives. So that they will know how incredibly lucky we are to have what we do have. So that we can cherish the freedom that was bought by freedom fighters all over the world. Only when we cherish what we have, will we struggle to keep it.