History of Sorts

I always take the approach to explain things so that a child can understand them, not because I am condescending, but because I know that if a child understands it, everyone else should.

How would you explain the Nazi ideology to a child, though? Especially during the 1933–1945 years.

How would you explain the removal of neighbours from your street or the classmates from the school—the removal of specific groups of people from society?

People who were just like anyone else. They looked the same, spoke the same language and dialect, and had the same habits. The only difference for most, not all, was that they had a different religion. They didn’t go to a church on Sunday but to a synagogue on Saturday.

You could not explain this to a child—because there’s no logic to it. None whatsoever.

How do you explain people being forced from their houses/apartments so violently, then taken to particular assembly points and put in railroad cars—not with sections for human beings but for cattle? To be transported far away, where they were murdered or put into forced slave labour. As one lady from Ulm described what she witnessed during her stay in the transit camp on the Killesberg in Stuttgart, “About one thousand people of Jewish descent, from all of Württemberg and Hohenzollern, were brought there on November 27, 1941. Then they were housed in the so-called “Hall of Honor of the Reichsnährstand,” built for the Reichsgartenschau in 1939. They were the first victims of a total of more than 2,500 Jewish citizens who were deported via the transit camp on the Killesberg to the assembly and concentration camps in Riga, Iżbica, Auschwitz, Buchenwald, the Theresienstadt ghetto and a camp near Wolfenbüttel. Most of them never return.”

There is no sensible explanation.

How would you explain that families were separated, destroyed, and babies murdered? And all because of a political movement headed by delusional and evil men? How would you explain that, which is so clear to see when happening, yet so there is so little resistance?

How would you explain to a child that suddenly they have to go to another dentist or doctor? Now they have to buy bread and other food somewhere else. How do you explain to a university student that their lectures in physics have no longer on the curriculum?

How do they explain the lack of resistance? Is it because of some herd mentality? Were they waiting for someone else to make the first move? You do what others do or do nothing as others do nothing.

How could you explain that it easily could be you next—wasn’t that realized? People were being executed by the Nazis—just for making jokes about Hitler. Did people not see this as something fundamentally wrong and rotten to the core?

I am not judging, as it’s easy to question all these things because I do not risk my life by asking questions. In retrospect, it is easy to be critical. The simple fact is that those who did not live in that time would not know how they would react. I know I wouldn’t.

However, with retrospect and hindsight comes the option for us to recognize the signs of the past, To take action when we see history repeating itself. Now we don’t have any excuses. Unfortunately, another fact is that people don’t learn from history. Mistakes from the past are often repeated and often amplified.

We are not that far away now from the environment that was allowed to flourish in 1930s Germany.

sources

Tatort Nordbahnhof