Random Geek Child

Sticking with last week’s theme of the Holocaust, here’s the other article I wrote for that project:

We’ve all heard about the Holocaust, a systematic mass slaughter conducted by the Nazis in Germany before and during the second World War that left approximately 17 million supposedly inferior humans dead. This atrocity was so lacking in some way to aptly describe its magnitude, it warranted the creation of its own word, “genocide,” which refers to the deliberate killing of a large group of people, especially those of a particular ethnic group or nation.

The Holocaust was not actually the first genocide, but it was the first to fall so significantly into the public eye and likely the largest. Similar horrors have been happening for centuries, with examples as far back as the Greeks and Romans, and in Biblical reference to the relentless and unjust persecution of the Jewish people. More recent examples include the contemporary Armenian, Assyrian and Greek genocides during and after World War I carried out by the Ottoman government in an attempt to remove those ethnic groups from their population. They had approximately 1.5 million, 150,000 to 300,000, and between 450,000 and 750,000 casualties, respectively, most of them civilians and rightfully Ottoman citizens. Still, none of these even neared the atrocious death count of the Holocaust that brought such an issue to the world stage.

Since the discovery of this massacre, several similar genocides have occurred in various places across the world. There was the Cambodian genocide of 1975, which lasted over 3 and a half years and killed between 1.671 and 1.871 million, which was 21-24% of Cambodia’s population at the time. Another example is the Rwandan genocide against the Tutsi in 1994, which left between half a million to a million dead, a devastating death toll even before considering that it occured over only a hundred days, or just little over three months.

You’d think that, after such a horrendous act as the Holocaust, humanity would have learned its lesson. So why hasn’t it?

Unfortunately, it likely has. The lesson is just not what we would have hoped. Instead of discouraging such a thing from ever happening again, the Holocaust set a precedent, showing that it was and is humanly possible to systematically dispose of people you oppose or consider inferior. It also suggests that the international community is not likely to interfere so long as the details of the situation are kept out of the public spotlight, or worse, that the international community simply won’t care, a combination of which seem to have been the case during the Holocaust.

The other incidents reinforce this message. In each of the Armenian, Assyrian and Greek genocides, which I’m overarchingly going to refer to as the Ottoman genocides for simplicity, and in the Rwandan genocide, while the rest of the world was at least somewhat aware of what was happening, they made no impactful move to stop it. In the Cambodian genocide, at least, they had some excuse, since they didn’t really have much intel on what was happening, but that too sends a dangerous message.

While this may seem downcasting and pessimistic, it is important to note that just because humanity has learned the wrong lesson does not mean that it cannot learn the right one. Perhaps, if those whose hatred, anger and fear may lead them to commit these atrocities have not been discouraged from such actions by examples like those I’ve shared with you today, but instead empowered, then it now falls on the rest of us to learn our lesson from history. To learn that we cannot be complicit in these actions, even if only by inaction, and that it is our obligation to learn and see all that we can, and where we see these wrongs, resist them. If the rest of the world hadn’t sat back and let these horrible things happen then they may not have, and it is my hope that in the future they won’t, because we will learn from our prior mistakes and not repeat them, but instead stand and fight these injustices.

To quote the Bataillon de Chasseurs Ardennais motto: “Résiste et Mords!” (“Resist and Bite!”)

Now that I’ve run out of old poetry, I figured I’d continue on the World War II/Holocaust chain of thought from about a month ago, when I brought up my granddad’s account of the Blitz. This time, it’s an article I wrote for school about the medical experiments conducted at the camps.

We are taught that the concentration camps were used to kill the Nazi’s victims and enemies. They also served to incarcerate people whom the Nazis believed were a security threat and to exploit forced labor. The lesser known use of these camps, however, was medical experimentation.

    With theoretically “inferior” subjects in the camps, doctors could experiment without worrying about the patient’s wellbeing. They were, for all attempts and purposes, disposable, allowing the medical personnel to operate at risk to the subject’s life without qualms. As a result, many of those who were experimented on during this time did not survive the tests, or were severely injured in the process.

    They did a combination of experiments based in curiosity, efficiency tests, and attempts at finding cures and solutions to problems without risking the lives of their own in the process. The term “curiosity” here sounds innocent; believe me, it was not. They put twins through inhumane tests, compared how different ethnicities withstood various diseases, and collected heterochromatic eyes. They tested efficiency of their various methods of murdering people and of sterilization.

    As for the other tests, they did everything from infecting patients with deadly diseases like typhus, tuberculosis, yellow fever, and more, and then trying to cure them, to bone grafting attempts, to exposing them to chemical weaponry in hope of finding antidotes, to forcing them to drink seawater (attempting to make it drinkable) to freezing them (finding a treatment for hypothermia) to killing them with simulated high altitudes (what altitude is safe for pilots to parachute from?).

    It is unknown exactly how many people were experimented on in the camps. There is a minimum of 15,754 documented victims, but it is likely that there were many more, considering the Nazis’ notoriety for leaving these kind of statistics undocumented.

My grandad grew up in England and was there for World War II. After showing me The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe for the first time, Mom emailed him to ask for some information on the bombings. This was his reply.

“Here are some comments on German bombing during World War II.

“Where I lived in the north of England, we had no serious bombing. There were plenty of bigger targets, much closer to Germany or the French airports from which they sent their planes. One night a plane dropped a lot of fire bombs, but they all fell in the playing field of a girls’ high school about four blocks from our home. We suspect that a plane returning from a raid on Newcastle, a much bigger town to our north, wanted to get rid of its load.

“London was the biggest target, and from the beginning of September 1940, an average of 200 planes a night bombed London every night for two months. Bombing continued after that but not so regularly and on a smaller scale.

“Many children were evacuated to small towns and villages in the west of England, which were safe because there was no point in bombing them. A lot of these children did not see their parents for three or four years!

“Since most of the bombing was at night, many people slept in bomb shelters, and also in the stations of the London Underground railway after it closed down for the night.

“I moved to London five years after the war, and I lived and worked in the East End, which was the area most heavily damaged. I worked near the docks, which were an obvious target. In that area whole blocks of houses had been wiped off the map, and when they rebuilt after the war, they sometimes relocated the streets and gave them new names. Other streets of brick houses would have many gaps, with perhaps half the houses gone.

“The German plan was simply to try to make London uninhabitable, but they did not succeed. It was a matter of luck what was hit and what wasn’t. The House of Commons was badly damaged, but Westminster Abbey, just across the street, was untouched. Fire bombs fell on the roof of St. Paul’s Cathedral, but the firewatchers were able to put them out before they did much damage.

“Air attacks on London declined when the Germans invaded Russia and were also heavily involved in fighting in North Africa. But in June, 1944, just after the allied invasion in the north of France, a new kind of attack came. The Germans launched flying bombs (the V1), which were pilotless and had jet engines set to fly just the distance to reach the London area and then turn off and fall to the ground. Over the next few months they sent several thousand of them, and there was no telling where they would land. My older brother was a member of an anti-aircraft battery stationed on the south-east coast, whose job was to try to shoot them down before they crossed the coast.

“Three months later they began sending asupersonic rockets (the V2), which flew in a very high arch and arrived without warning. Again, since the aiming could only be approximate, the target was London. Their range was about 200 miles. They sent about 1,300 in the seven months from then until March 1945, when we were able to eliminate the last launching sites.”