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Denial and guilt
by Thanos Kalamidas
2009-02-06 10:17:46 |
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It’s like the postman who always knocks twice the way news surrounding the Nazi era hit this last week. I never lived that era, born long after, but my father had very vivid memories since he was a young man during WWII and, of course, other members of the family lived during the war and the Nazi occupation in Greece.
The stories these people told me were not exactly the stories you would like to hear or I presume you would like to tell so it was very rare any of them said any and often they tried to finish the story quickly avoiding my curiosity saying that these were hard times nobody wants to remember or live again. During WWII nearly a million Greeks lost their lives, a lot from starvation since the occupation army was stealing all the food and sending it to the Nazi army leaving the local population literally starving to death. Photos from that period are apocalyptic to how far human cruelty can go and how low levels humanity reached during these years.
The Greek-Jewish community, especially in Salonika, suffered a lot and this is a very kind way to describe the truth, trains full travelled through Yugoslavia and Bulgaria to Dachau and Auschwitz-Birkenau with very few of them finding their way to return home alive, the stories that came with these people are just beyond any logic. I know, where I grew up in Athens we had a neighbour survivor of Auschwitz. Believe it or not until the end of his life the man was feeling guilty because he survived, so hard was the trauma of the experience. He said very little about it but somehow you didn’t need him to do so, a look at his face and the stories that had already been part of the world’s history was enough to see the unbelievable pain and sorrow.
The Greeks who followed the train's way to Dachau and Auschwitz were not only the Greek-Jews; there were gypsies, Communists and getting closer to the end of the world everybody who opposed them, including the people who joined the resistance, politicians and clerics of the Greek Orthodox Church. There were indeed priests who saw the real face of evil and opposed it going to the mountains joining the partisans of the resistance or helping in the cities the ones who looked for a shelter and in many cases the role of some priests proved heroic and admirable. But as I said before a lot of them followed to rail-road to Auschwitz without return with very few to return and talk about their experiences.
Their experience had a lot of death, gas chambers, torture and executions and there is no doubt for the truth behind their stories. Actually one of them later became the leader of a political party with critical personal involvement in the Modern Greek political history and even though he was very rarely referring to these stories you could feel the pain he carried from the experience. And this was Greece, one of the many European countries that suffered dramatically during the WWII and one of the many countries that lost a part of its population in these gas champers, in these camps out of hell.
These stories are not legends or myths created to emphasize the need of a nation or to explain a phenomenon but historical facts and what makes them more painful is not that there are written stories or films about these camps but that there are living witnesses, there are people who saw them, who lived with the smell of the dead bodies and again if that is not enough a visit to Auschwitz is enough to make you feel embarrassed that these people called themselves humans. As I said I born after the WWII but the stories, these very few stories my father told me they were so horrifying that I know that the people who did that were able for any kind of crime and then the eyes and the face of my neighbour, old Abraham will be in my mind all my life like a stamp of the truth his eyes seen. Finally in early eighties I visited Auschwitz, the place has often haunted my dreams and what I saw was a disserted monument to human monstrosity, empty buildings and yes the gas chambers to remind me all my compatriots who died in there.
No, I cannot understand how somebody can say nowadays with all this proof that gas chambers never existed and that there were victims but not so many as history says and yes I agree with the hunt of the Nazi war criminals sixty years after because all these millions of souls need rest and prove that there is justice in this world. In general I think I am a person with a lot of tolerance but no I cannot accept that; I cannot accept that a man dares offend so badly so many dead people because that’s what happened with the British Bishop Richard Williamson actually in cases like that I believe that these people regarding their position in the society have another often personal agenda and they use democracy’s tolerance to promote these agendas and that makes them dangerous, because I saw Abraham’s eyes but my daughter will have only the written stories to believe.
The case of the ‘death-doctor’ Aribert Heim is part of all the above, the death-doctor just like Josef Mengele and the Butcher of Lyon are part of the prove to what happened in those concentration camps and yes justice doesn’t mean eye for eye but that they must stand and face their crimes in front of the world. Coming to Bishop Richard Williamson with his denial he is nothing else than a partner to these crimes even with sixty years difference and the Vatican should examine his real motives which hopefully have nothing to do with the church.
world+war+two Nazism Holocaust Greece |
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