Mom was a girl during World War II; she was in the 3rd grade when it ended. My Grampa Dan and her uncles went off to war in the Pacific and returned only years later and uncle Sammy didn't come back at all. Mom must have imagined that war is a black hole where the men in her life disappeared, sometimes forever.
When I was a boy the war was a distant memory. In my imagination it was this great adventure with tanks and planes, like a Hollywood movie where the good guys win and with a happy end. Mom didn't like wars. She didn't care if little boys daydream about soldiers and guns and she wouldn't let us see war movies, so I watched The World at War, a documentary series on the public educational channel which was every bit as good as a war movie and the tanks and things blowing up were real.
I was about 12 years old when I saw an episode called "The Final Solution". I had never heard about the Holocaust. I was totally unprepared for what I would see the next hour. By the time it was done, I was in tears, horrified by what I had seen.
Even now I find it hard to imagine. I can't get my head around it. The deaths of the 3000 victims of 9/11 that shocked the world in 2001 was a slow day at Auschwitz.
It's hard to imagine how cheap human life was back then. How can human beings hate so much that they will kill people they don't even know. I can't imagine monsters that can kill without anger, hearts that are so frozen that they can't be moved even by the cries of babes.
I tried to imagine how big it was. I thought that if I put 6,000,000 dots on my blog, it would be possible to imagine the Holocaust. I pressed on the period button, and when I had 1000 dots I copied and pasted until I had 10,000, and then copied and pasted until I had 100,000 and so on. Finally I had 6,000,000 dots, more than 500 pages on a word document. Copying that took several minutes, and then I tried pasting on my blog.
My computer stopped functioning. The cursor wouldn't move. I couldn't close Explorer. I had to restart in order to use the computer again. I guess that six million dots are too much for a computer to imagine.
And you think about it; that each dot is a life, someone that was a whole world that loved people and was loved by people, and each one disappeared forever into a black hole.
If six million is too much for a computer, if there is a face and a name and a life for each dot, how do you imagine that?
1 comment:
cheapening of human live, devaluation of human life.
but that is happening all over the world now, isn't it?
maybe not that obvious as 60000 people being exterminated, but maybe.....how our lives are no longer as valued now?
how we may soon be a commodity one day?
how we are reduced to cells and more cells. we are just that...
(And even more ironically, the Holocaust is aboiut Eugenics. The pure race, the pure cell...)
There never really are different races- are there?
There is only ONE human race.
And why did the Holocaust happen- to eradicate all other races, leaving one pure Aryan race?
No, I don't think there are more than one race on earth- we are all the same. I think it is cheapening of human life as to how we kill one another- the same kind.
on the other hand, the hardest part about world war, i believe, is that technology is improving so fast, but people are still using old-war strategies. people still go on close range to kill each other, but this time round, with projectile weapons such as machine guns and tanks. thus, there is a MASSIVE and horrifc number of people killed in an INSTANT.
I guess it would never happen like that again.
War now is quite different...
very different, and there is a war poem 'Five ways to kill a man'- the poet says that the best way to kill a man now, is to just leave him in the 21st century.
Now, that speaks a lot.
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