Studying the Holocaust

One of the modules I'm doing here at USM is The Holocaust: Policy, Practice and Response. Every Tuesday evening I spend two hours in a classroom in Portland hearing about the history behind the Holocaust and the events during those horrible years. And every week I have readings to do from various books. One of those books is a selection of documents and first hand accounts, and it is completely harrowing.

I've just been sat reading personal accounts by SS about the gas chambers, and I feel ill. I had Monty Python music playing in the background, in an attempt to not get quite so dragged into it. It kind of worked. My feet have been tapping away to the music quite happily, but the rest of me has been feeling horrible. I read an account of how men would stand atop the gas chambers and tell the people that they were to take showers, and receive hot soup before being assigned well paying jobs. The people willingly undressed and hurriedly went into the chambers. The person who wrote that particular document - Filip Muller, a part of the Sonderkommando - could hear the cries for help, the prayers, the banging and knocking and desperate scraping on the doors. I don't understand how anyone could do that to another human being. I've read the documentation, I know the history and the theory behind the Holocaust, but it still completely astonishes me.

I'm not the most compassionate person in the world, I harbour grudges. But such hatred astonishes me. It isn't even hatred. To hate someone you have to consider them to be a person. Urgh! I can't even think straight.

I started to keep these reactions in a separate blog, as I thought I needed to keep a reactionary journal for the module. I don't, so I'm closing the blog, but I'm going to post here what I've written. I love this blog, I love getting my thoughts out to the world. There are things that I can't write about. Issues with people who might read the blog, for instance. But my personal feelings can be, and will continue to be, published on this blog and shared with the world. Someone out there might feel the same way.

I read a lot of blogs, and I'm aware that not everyone will agree with some of my opinons, or my ways. And those people have a write to disagree, I just hope I don't get the abuse that other people have gotten. I guess as long as my blog has such a small readership I'll be okay.

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Posts from Reactionary Journal blog...

Saturday, 12 September 2009

I'm not entirely sure why I chose to study the holocaust. I've known about it since high school, and the events of those years have always appalled and astonished me, but I have never studied it in depth. Up until this semester, all I knew of the Holocaust I learned from movies and television and books. Not necessarily accurate. I started this module with the hopes of learning the truth. So far the things I have learned are disturbing, but I don't regret enrolling. My only regret is that our lectures are late on a Tuesday evening. After class is over, I have nothing to do but wait half an hour for a bus, and wallow in the depressive fugue that the lectures so far have left me in.

In our first lecture, on September 1st 2009, we watched two short videos. The first was called "Night and Fog" and was made my a French director in 1955. It toured a concentration camp as it stood today (or 1955), and showed a lot of footage and still photography from concentration camps when they were in use. The video was interesting and fascinating and absolutely disturbing. Seeing the footage of the people who were tortured was bad enough, but the image that most affected me was one from 1955. The director, Alain Resnais, showed us the ceiling of one of the gas chambers. The camera showed us, close up, the grooves and scratches and furrows made in the concrete ceiling by the people trapped in the chamber. Seeing that ceiling, and those marks, made my stomach climb into my throat. Even writing about it now I'm still feeling a little sick. Those marks are the last imprint on earth of people who were rounded up, tortured and murdered just because of who they were. Because of situations beyond their control, they were punished and killed in such a way that they scratched grooves in a concrete ceiling in attempts to escape. It makes me feel guilty for being alive and for taking my freedom for granted.

I get abuse and insults because of who I am, and I complain about it regularly. Now I feel like I have no right to complain. Nothing that has ever been done to me is anywhere near as bad as what those people went through.

Sunday, 20 September 2009

We have a book to read entitled "Sources of the Holocaust," edited by Steve Hochstadt. It contains 84 different documents from history regarding the holocaust and each week we are required to read a certain number.

This week I had to read 10 of them, and my reactions were quite strong. I thought I'd note them here, since this is what the journal is for. I'll also note any reactions to the documents I've read previous to this week.

Some of the first documents we had to read included excerpts from Martin Luther's "On the Jews and Their Lies" (1543), a Papal bull about Jews from Pope Paul IV written in 1555 and parts of an article entitled "Jewish Morality" which appeared in a Vactican newspaper in 1893. These documents display so much hatred towards the Jews. I don't quite understand it. I see the reasons before me, I know logically why these people were against the Jews, but I don't quite understand how you can hate an entire race of people based purely on their religion. It seems unfathomable to me, the whole thing does.

One of the groups of people targeted by the Nazis were handicapped people. There are a few documents in this book that reflect that. All of them refer to people with handicaps as "unworthy of life". Having sufffered a mental handicap myself, and having a hadicapped mother, this is a sensitive area for me. One of the documents I've just read was notes from a meeting of German mayors concerning murder of the handicapped.

What appalled me most was that I could kind of see their logic. The words and terminology that they use. "They are nothing but a burden," "there is no possibility that these people will ever become healthy," "they only take nourishment away from other, healthy people." I was appalled with myself, very angry and very guilty, until I realised that this was the point. The Germans used terminology like this deliberately to make people forget. The phrases make the people they plan to murder sound like people on life support, who have no hope left. They make their plans sound like a form of euthanasia, rather than a plan to kill people who would be considered healthy and relatively normal by today's standards.

Two documents later was a table of money saved by murdering the handicapped, from 1941. Dr Eduard Brandt worked out that by "disinfecting" over 70,000 people the German government saved nearly 9 million Reichsmarks. I don't know how much that is in English money, but I imagine it's a lot. The Germans did everything they could to justify their actions.

Another document that made me feel a little ill was an excerpt from the Memoir of Dr Paula Tobias about the boycott of Jewisih businesses on April 1st 1933. Dr Tobias was a Jewish doctor, and whilst some Jewish businesses were treated violently and dramatically during the boycott (there were bloody riots and arrests all over the place), Dr Tobias and her husband planted potatoes whilst their son went to school and their chauffeur yelled at the SA guards stood at their door.

My instant reaction was that we only really hear horror stories from the war and the holocaust, and that surely not every Jew could have had it so bad. Then I felt guilty again.

This course is creating a lot of guilty feelings and things in me. I feel kinda weird now. I'm disturbed about my own morality. Is this normal?