The bad, and good, side of humans - From the Cluttered Desk with Keith Roulston

This past Monday marked the 80th anniversary of allied troops liberating the Auschwitz Nazi death camps in Poland and eastern Europe in 1945.

 

I was thinking of it because of a column last week in the Globe and Mail by Marsha Lederman, whose mother was imprisoned during World War II in the Birkenau death camp, associated with Auschwitz. Lederman describes her mother’s situation as she was forced, with other malnourished women, to pick up boulders and move them. The next day, still in the shadow of the chugging smokestacks where other Jews and unwanted people like those who were called Gypsies then were cremated, they would be forced to move those boulders back to where they started. Perhaps because she was only 19, her mother survived months of this treatment.

 

As Germany commenced losing the war and needed more workers, in November, 1944, Lederman’s mother was sent to a satellite camp of Buchenwald, in Lippstadt, Germany, to make munitions for her captors. On April 1, 1945, she was on a death march when she was liberated by U.S. soldiers.

 

After the war, she met another survivor; they married and had three daughters, one of whom is Lederman. As a girl growing up in Canada, Lederman was “in a constant classroom of these atrocities: the absence of grandparents (gassed); the tattoo on my mother’s forearm; the sanctity with which we treated food, even gross leftovers”.

 

But in other stories published on the weekend, surveys found that more younger Canadians (though still a small minority, thankfully) thought the history of the Holocaust was exaggerated. Looking at the modern Germany of today, it’s perhaps understandable. It’s hard to see how these people, who seem so educated and modern, could have perpetrated such horrid crimes. It’s hard to accept that six million people could be murdered and disposed of.

 

I recall watching the fact-based 1961 film Judgement at Nuremberg as American actor Spencer Tracy plays an elderly U.S. judge in the 1947 Judges’ Trial, the third of 12 trials of Nazi war criminals conducted by the American occupying forces in Nuremberg, Germany. In the movie, as the Soviet Union cuts off highway access to supplies to the “western” parts of Berlin which was deep within the occupied “Russian” part of East Germany forcing all supplies to be flown into the capital, pressure is on the judges to hurry the trial. In scenes in the movie, Tracy drives through still-damaged areas.

 

But whole generations have grown up since those days. The fact that six million Jews, and others were killed or cremated in camps like Auschwitz seems so impossible. Not only young Canadians, but other right-wing Canadians and Americans doubt the reality of the Holocaust.

 

In Judgement at Nuremberg, Tracy questions the German staff working in the home in which he is staying. They deny any knowledge of the death camps. I recall another television show years ago when two young Germans visit one of the death camps and return, shaken, at what their grandparents and their grandparents’ neighbours were able to do.

 

But Lederman says there are other things than a doubt of history at play in 2025. “These flashes come at me often these days while watching the news. It happened this week when a populist leader announced he will end the hopes of people desperate to live in the safe country he now rules. Attendees in the sports arena cheered. They cheered the misery of other humans.”

 

Donald Trump, the newly-inaugurated President of the United States is not Hitler. Expelling millions of illegal immigrants in the U.S. is not as bad as gassing and cremating unwanted peoples. But Lederman talks of the cheers of the people listening to Trump speak in an arena. “How can one poor soul’s grave misfortune spark someone else’s celebration?”

 

That’s the Holocaust: we cannot forget what happened. We cannot forget what the propensity to hate can do. We can’t, for instance, ignore the pain and suffering of thousands and thousands of innocent Palestinians when aggrieved Israelites struck back after Palestine’s leaders in Hamas struck into Israel, killing hundreds and taking hostages who were enjoying a music festival.

 

Humans have two sides. We see the good side daily as people volunteer to feed, clothe and find warm places to sleep for people who are homeless. We see international efforts to help starving, homeless people in Africa, often suffering because of greedy warriors.

 

We must help in the efforts of the good side of humans, but we also need to remember how badly we can behave, as the German people did during the Holocaust.