Sleep, my young one. Sleep, all beautiful.
Sleep in the distant sound of arms.
Sleep, you who were born too late, sleep, you who were born too soon.
Sleep for the time of rotten luck.
Sleep for the kings. Sleep for the beggars.
Sleep for the heaven of bad signs,
For the red ocean of fire.
Sleep for the dark farandole
Dead and cursed battalions.
You can sleep: the Earth is mad.
It is your mother who tells you so.
Sleep for the bed that saw you being born,
Where I curse the piercing cold
At night, I see the death of traitors there.
I have dreams full of blood.
When the grey and bitter victory
Comes tapping on our windowpanes,
I will take you in my thin arms:
You will see them, all the heroes.
Dawn will be pure mother-of-pearl,
But before the stroke of noon
There will be great massacres.
It is your mother who tells you so.”
Excerpt from the poem, “Lullabye for the Children of Europe,” by Louis Cauchois.
A few days ago I visited Struthof. I week before that I visited the Anne Frank House. Both are poignant reminders of an age when many on the European Continent forgot their humanity and treated each other with such contempt, such viscous cruelty, that were it not for the physical proof of the acts one would scarcely believe that modern men were capable of such barbarity. Over 6 million men, women and children died during The Holocaust. Strikingly though, at no point during the years of Hitler’s reign of terror could the Nazi Party claim a majority of Germans as members. What made The Holocaust possible was for a majority of Germans and others under Nazi occupation to decide that the persecution of Jews, Gypsies, Poles, communists, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the homeless, alcoholics and the mentally and physically handicapped was not something that they needed to be overly concerned with. The saying goes, “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” Struthof and the Anne Frank House were chilling reminders of the veracity of this axiom.
From 1933 to 1939, laws were passes in Germany barring Jews from owning land, being newspaper editors, and qualifying as lawyers or officers of the court. They are denied access to the national health insurance. Jews are denied the right to serve in the German military. They are restricted from having sexual relations with or marrying non-Jews and are eventually are deprived of all legal rights most other Germans took for granted, like owning businesses or even eventually property. They were also stripped of the right to travel freely and were forced to carry special papers at all times identifying them as Jews. During this time, laws were also passed during this time heavily penalizing homosexual acts by consenting male adults. Laws were passed allowing for the imprisonment of members of religious sects deemed unacceptable, such as Jehovah’s Witnesses and also allowing for the imprisonment of the homeless. At no time did the German people rise up with sufficient force so as to dissuade the Nazi leadership from continuing to implement and execute these persecutions. All of these laws were aimed at accomplishing two goals: to create a sense of “other” with regard to these groups so that “ordinary” Germans would instinctively view them as alien and therefore entitled to fewer rights; and, to deprive these “alien” groups of the power to defend themselves. This is what made The Holocaust possible. The German people, and eventually those living under Nazi rule, decided that their own welfare was more important than the welfare of any of these “alien” groups.
This attitude on the part of “ordinary” Dutch living under Nazi occupation is what forced Anne Frank and her family escape into hiding. A fourteen year girl spent what should have been the best years of her youth, and what ended up being the last years of her life, skulking silently, half starved and afraid, in a series of dark rooms not much bigger than the apartment I’m going home to in May. This attitude on the part of “ordinary” French is what made the horrors of Struthof possible. There 22,000 men and women died frozen, beaten, emaciated and diseased among the pristine pine forests of the Vosges Mountains. Among the dead were 90 who were sent to Struthof’s gas chamber for no other reason than a professor of medicine at a French University wanted undamaged skeletons for medical research. When humans begin to think of others as somehow less human, and therefore entitled to fewer rights, atrocities like this become possible.
None of this would have been possible had “ordinary” men and women not forgotten the simple truths that all people are created equally and that all people are entitled to equal rights and equal dignity under the law. None of this would have been possible had “ordinary” Europeans not forgotten what Kant taught them 150 years prior: that a person acts morally only when he or she acts as if his or her conduct was establishing a universal law governing others in similar circumstances and that no person should ever be treated solely as a means to some other end.
But in the decades since 1945 Europe has endeavored, it seems, to relearn these lessons. I’ve visited the German Federal Constitutional Court where I learned that the consequentialist felicific calculus that underpinned the social acceptance of Nazi laws depriving select minorities of their rights had been utterly rejected. I’ve visited the Euro Institute where I have been shown strategies for ensuring cross-cultural cooperation and understanding between different European nationalities. I’ve visited the European Court of Human Rights were I was informed of court ruling after court ruling guaranteeing that each and every European citizen is entitled to the same fundamental rights, including freedom of speech, expression, assembly and religion. And I’ve visited the Council of Europe, where it was made clear to me that the membership status of any state is contingent on their acceptance of the principles of democracy, human rights and the rule of law.
Europe may have some progress yet to make. The wars in the former Yugoslavia occurred in my life time and in them over 100,000 were killed, many due to ethnic cleansing, and during much of which Europe stood by passively. But, in fairness it should also be pointed out that the states of the former Yugoslavia were outside both the EU and the Council of Europe until well after the end of the Yugoslav Wars and it is possible that failure to intervene in the genocide there was due more to questions around proper foreign policy rather than questions of human dignity and equality. What I find most heartening is that as I travel Europe and visit these places scarred by war and human indifference, no one seems to miss the point: that inaction in the face of evil breeds opportunity for evil to thrive.
Michael Shea
B.A. Political Science
First Year Master's Student
Georgia State EU Studies Program, Spring 2011
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