The Journey

On September 12, 2013  I embarked upon a three week visit to Eastern Europe, travelling to Berlin, Warsaw, Cracow, Auschwitz/Birkenau, Vienna, Prague, Dresden, and back to Berlin. Like any travelling experience it occured in different dimensions all at the same time. But for me the deepest, at once the most interesting and the most chilling is the awareness that I have of these places as centres of difficult-to-fathom evils perpetrated in the 20th century. This journey is a kind of pilgrimage, a visitation to sites where terrible crimes have been committed against innocents.

I came into an awareness of the Holocaust gradually. I don’t remember any particular knowledge of these events percolating through history lessons or readings when I was young. There was a general sense for someone like myself, born during and growing up after the Second World War that the Germans were “bad” people and that they had been our enemy. Little else. Certainly I remember nothing of a sense of horror about crimes committed against the Jewish populations in Europe. I attribute this at least in part to an incipient, not particularly overt, anti-Semitic bias that reigned in my childhood. Only as a young adult did I realize attitudes of this kind in comments or jokes made casually by my parents and others.

In 1970-71 I returned to university to take a fourth year of history, preparatory to seeking a teaching position. One of my courses was on modern European history. It laid before me some of the bare facts of the persecution of Jewish people across Europe, a movement consistent with centuries of profound anti-Semitism within Christian societies intolerant of difference. In unstable post-WWI Germany Hitler was able to galvanize the hatred underlying various kinds of discrimination and the periodic aggression toward Jews as a unifying energy, pointing his followers to a new millennium of glory within a romantically envisioned Aryan nation. The glory of this desired “pure” nation stood in stark contrast to the dehumanization marketed of Jews who had lived for centuries among Europeans. Hitler’s theme was embraced to various degrees by the German populous – some whole-heartedly, some passively out of indifference or fear of the serious repercussions of resistance. Ultimately the inner logic of the complete degradation of a group of people characterized as “vermin” led to a determination and a plan to eradicate them entirely.

Since taking this course, I have been a quite consistent reader of materials related to 20th century European history with a special focus on the totalitarian regimes in Germany, Russia/the USSR, and China, as well as the earlier and on-going dramas of slavery and colonialism throughout the world. My interest has been deeply personal, not because of family connections, but because of a sense that I have had from the beginning of my immersion in these periods: if I myself had lived within that arena and era, how would I have reacted to these events, where would I have stood and what would I have done? Facing the horrors described in these readings gave me a tablet upon which I could confront the nature of evil itself – not as something objective and separate from myself, but rather as an interior journey, a way of acknowledging my own capacity for doing harm to others as well as my fear of having to act in a manner which demands courage in the face of terrible consequences. I was not aware at first that this personal identification was at the core of my interest. It took many years before I could reflect upon and understand the importance of this focus in my own life.

It is most likely that my sensitivity to these issues stems from abuse that I suffered as a child and the consequent disillusionment that resulted. Abuse can rob a young person of her childhood – not necessarily on a physical or intellectual level – more on a barely realized, and certainly not articulated, level of the emotional and even moral life. From a space of relative innocence one experiences that bad things can happen and that safety is only relative. People who had been assumed friendly or at least neutral could potentially be abusive. Now they must be watched and guarded against. Within, one experiences the shame of the abuse itself and the consequent self-punishment and anger, sometimes turned against oneself but at other times toward others, even toward others in no sense responsible for one’s pain. Thus one can enter into a cycle of abuse, the potential for inflicting injury upon another, the cycle of evil.

On my journey I wanted to visit and to reflect upon this terrain, both on the ground and within myself. I continued to post on this blog before, during, and after my trip. I encouraged readers to leave comments or questions for me throughout this process.