TODAY IS THE ANNIVERSARY OF THE CLOSING OF THE AUSCHWITZ CONCENTTRATION CAMP

70 years ago, January 27, 1945, I was a 9-year-old boy living free and mostly unaware of the crimes against others that were committed regularly by individuals of the species to which I belonged.  I knew there was a terrible war raging in Europe and in the Pacific because members of my family, my mother’s and father’s brothers, were in the military; but I had little experience that would have made me wonder what caused wars. Even while it was happening in Germany in the 40s, I had not the slightest inkling that people were capable of such a great variety of outrageous, cruel and barbaric treatments of other humans, including children, all people whom they considered impure, inadequate persons. I experienced segregation because I lived in Arkansas and the few black children in Roseboro, Arkansas, attended school in a small house that had once been somebody’s residence,  and I attended a school that was built to be a school…for white people.  I remember going to a Christmas program at the black school. Mother and I were the only White people there. I still didn’t get it.  Even though my Mother clearly objected to it, as a child I suppose I thought segregation must be some kind of universal rule.

My family moved to California a couple of years after my uncles came home from the war. Nobody told me about Auschwitz... not in school or in church.   It wasn’t until I was a young adult that I learned the story… that by January, 1945, nearly five years after the first prisoners began arriving at Auschwitz-Birkenau when the death camp was closed… an estimated 1.1 million people had been killed. The largest group were victims of the Nazi “Final Solution to the jewish question.”  Others included Gypsies, homosexuals, and thousands of people of diverse nationalities whom Hitler and his followers considered to be racially impure… to be inadequate human beings.

Today I went to see the movie Selma with my friend Oliver. The movie was set in the time when Oliver was a boy not yet 10. Over lunch we talked about how little we knew about the atrocities adults perpetrate on each other when we were children… and how unsettling it is for us now to recognize that we humans seem not to behave better even after learning about our brutal history of wars and recurring cycles of social injustice.

I remember shooting cans off a fence post with a slingshot behind our house around the time I was ten. One day in the middle of “target practice with stones,” I looked up and saw a bird perched on a telephone wire. I aimed my slingshot at the bird, and it fell to the ground.  Desperately wishing I hadn’t hit it, I went over and picked up the little still-warm, bloody bundle of feathers. It was a moment I shall never forget. I was horrified at what I had done. I tried to tell myself it was only a bird and that I hadn’t really meant to do it.  All the fun went out of shooting at cans, so I went back home and put the slingshot on a shelf in the garage.  Thinking about it today, I had to acknowledge to myself that retiring the weapon to a shelf hadn’t been the appropriate response.  I don’t think I ever again took it out to the railroad tracks where there were plenty of rocks for target practice, but it was there. I wish I could look back on that day and see myself throwing the slingshot into the creek, but I didn’t do it.  I left it on the shelf…