by Geoff Hill
14 November 2007
Last month I was in Poland, an inspiring place with a can-do attitude to rival America. Just 15 years after collapse of the Soviet Bloc, it is the eighth-largest economy in Europe, but more about that later.
I was researching a book I have in mind about the reaction to genocide and why some crimes gain world attention while others are ignored, even covered up.
At Auschwitz, near the city of Krakow, two hours by train south of Warsaw, the evidence of Nazi atrocities has been preserved both at the main concentration camp and the satellite death zones like Birkenau a few kilometres away.
Entrance is free. There are book shops, guides and chilling exhibits including a haystack of hair cut from gassed victims and piles of spectacles, shoes, clothes, and suit cases that once held the few treasures Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and German dissenters were allowed to take from their homes before being jammed into cattle cars on trains bound for hell.
From Hungary, France, Bulgaria, Holland, Belgium, Italy and, of course, Germany itself, more than a million souls arrived at Auschwitz. Those who could not work were gassed; those who could died from hunger, beatings, typhoid and frost bite. Even with global warming, for much of the year Poland is a cold place.
But it wasn’t the north wind that chilled me as I climbed from the surviving gas chamber and walked past a crematorium blown up by the Germans fleeing Stalin’s Red Army in January 1945. No matter the books and documentaries, the stories, pictures and essays: nothing prepares you for Auschwitz. You can dismiss other people’s take as slanted or exaggerated, but when you move through it yourself there’s no such comfort.
Eye to eye with evil, many visitors just break down and cry.
When the Nazis left, prisoners who could stagger were moved to other camps in Germany and Austria where conditions were even worse. As the Reich collapsed, food and medical supplies ran out and thousands perished in the weeks before Allied victory. Back at Birkenau, Russian troops found the “lucky” ones who had been left behind, the living skeletons you see on film, weak, diseased, but somehow hanging on.
That’s where the nightmare ended, but it began in 1900, in South Africa, when the British coined the term, “concentration camp” torching Boer farms and herding the women and children into holding centres with little food or sanitation. Hitler took the idea further, but even without gas the Brits managed to kill some 27 000 inmates, (24 000 of them children). Whether it was by design or neglect remains a contentious issue, and there were even larger camps for blacks living in the Boer republics who were viewed as potential collaborators.
Moving through the Birkenau bunk houses, over the rail tracks that run into camp, the medical centres where Dr Josef Mengele tied women’s legs in child birth or starved twins to see which one died first, past the barbed-wire fences, the interrogation cells and the gallows where Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoess was hanged after the war, it struck me that in Africa there’s so little to show for the crimes we have suffered ... and perpetrated.
Tourists wait to enter the main gate at Auschwitz, Poland, and a sketch of how it looked during the war
At the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, there’s an excellent mural depicting the British camps, and two internment centres are preserved near Kimberly and Aliwal North, while exhibits at the War Museum of the Boer Republics in Bloemfontein bring the horror to life
But for the most part, only graves survive and even some of these are lost.
For more recent history, we have Robben Island, no less chilling as a symbol of tyranny. Time now to preserve apartheid-era interrogation centres, murder bases and the torture instruments (some of which are still in use at our police stations).
I spend much of my time working in the rest of Africa, places where under the rule of thugs like Banda, Mobuto, Menghistu of Ethiopia, Amin and so many others, millions were killed, abused, or locked up at re-education camps as happened under Machel in Mozambique where an estimated 30 000 died: same horror with a new name.
In the early ’80s Mugabe sent his North-Korean-trained Fifth Brigade into Matabeleland where they murdered somewhere between 12 000 and 20 000 civilians and tortured maybe four times that number ... in camps ringed with barbed wire.
In Somaliland, the breakaway democracy north of Somalia, I have climbed the banks of the Maroodijeex River that flows through the capital, Hargeisa, where in 1989, troops of the late President Said Barre gunned down men, women and children from the town. The skeletons are still there, just below the sand.
In Rwanda, the government of Paul Kagame has decided to leave tons of human bones where they fell in the genocide of 1984, so that future generations can be shocked by them and no one can ever deny the truth.
As for the 1.7 million who died at Biafara in Nigeria in the 1960s, thousands of Arabs slaughtered in Zanzibar or four-million and counting in the DRC, there’s barely a headstone.
Places like Robben Island, the Boer camp at Kimberly and bone-gardens of Rwanda are so few, one might forget the horrors that African leaders of every tribe, faith and colour have unleashed on their people.
At Auschwitz they like to say, “Never Again!” but how long is never? And if the Holocaust happened today, what would be our reaction? If Darfur is anything to do by, a new Hitler might kill six million before the United Nations even made a statement, let alone tried to stop him. Given Pretoria’s reaction at the UN to atrocities in Burma and Sudan, South Africa would almost certainly vote against debate on the issue.
This is nothing new; in 1983, there was barely a word against Mugabe’s ethnic cleaning of Matabeleland. Those who rightly criticise Thabo Mbeki’s quiet diplomacy, said nothing back then, despite the story making headline news. Helen Suzman has apologised for this, Desmond Tutu has perhaps made up for it in recent speeches against Mugabe, but at the time the only sounds were cries of the dying.
Former Zambian president, Kenneth Kaunda, and Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere, so vocal on apartheid, were silent and the murders were kept out of their state-controlled press. Tough call mind you given that, at home, both men had banned all opposition to their own rule.
That’s why we need more places like Auschwitz, Birkenau, Robben Island, the Boer camp at Kimberly; ever-more memorials in Rwanda, Somaliland and fresh ones in Mozambique, Matabeleland, Biafara, Uganda, Zanzibar, and, when it’s over, Darfur.
In my opening line I mentioned the miracle of modern Poland, making up for 50 lost years under the Russian boot. The country is booming and the future rich in promise with construction sites everywhere and a government that's gone out of its way to woo investors. For the Poles, things have never looked so good.
Places like Auschwitz and Birkenau make their new world a safer place because the warning is not just written in the constitution but stands where it did when the deed was done, so you can touch it and weep.
Lest we forget!
http://www.swradioafrica.com/pages/auschwitz141107.htm
