I AM GRATEFUL FOR THIS LIFE- REINA KHADILKAR

I AM GRATEFUL FOR THIS LIFE

I don’t want to write about this, but I must write!

I must face the worst part of the history of this world to know how blessed I am to be born in the era which began far later than the world’s worst nightmare, ‘The Holocaust’

How else will I understand and realize that with all the ups and downs I have had, that there was something more terrible than the simple uncomplicated downs of one’s life to know that I am very, very grateful for this life.

How else will I learn why we are given the mind which can think big, the mind which can think bad and the mind which can think nothing!

How will I know the horrors of holocaust on one side and the strength of the human spirit to withstand it, if I do not revisit and acknowledge this dark hour in the history of humankind.

Lessons of mankind’s history are the paths that show us the peculiar ways in which the world develops into what it is at present. If we never learn from the lessons of history of the world, then as they say, you are condemned to repeat it!

With great difficulty and a heavy heart and, of course, a deep sense of pride for the indomitable human spirit, I try to find words to describe my encounter with an actual concentration camp of WWII.

I dreaded the day that was to take me to the Sachsenhausen Concentration camp a few miles from Berlin where a day earlier we had seen yet another hot spot of the world war and the Nazi regime. We walked through the streets of Berlin past palaces now converted to museums, the Humboldt University that has till date produced 29 Nobel prize winners in all fields and continues to inspire students from across the world to create a better world and vie for the Nobel, a sculpture of a mother holding her dead young son, a war martyr, in her lap as a reminder of the wars faced by Berlin leaving a deep impact on the heart and a flow of tears that welled up in the eyes!

We walked across the ‘Memorial of the murdered Jews’, designed by architect Peter Eisenman, which consists of rows and rows of sloping concrete slabs arranged in a grid pattern with an underground information space holding names of 3 million Jews who were holocaust victims. There is no explanation or derivation of the architect’s vision of this memorial and we are left to walk in the grid deriving our own meaning of the memorial for the hapless souls who died the sorriest death ever recorded in history. The gloom gets to you as you move solemnly in the space, a foreboding of what was to come next day.

The great Berlin wall dividing the east and west, now stands in a large enclosed area as a memorial to the days of Communist and Capitalist rules that separated not just geographical areas and ideologies but people, families, sons from fathers, mothers from children, lovers and friends. The story of how the wall was erected in the midnight of a Saturday and when people on either side woke up on that fateful Sunday morning found themselves imprisoned beyond the wall and unable to go back home, sends shivers down the spine if one just stands there to feel the helplessness beyond! The last stop at Checkpoint Charlie, the very famous historical point dividing Berlin occupied by USA and the Berlin controlled by Russia during the (in)famous cold war is now a photo-op point belying the terror of those days. Berlin was as much a history of its kings and their art and culture as much as it is about the world wars that raised it to rubble. Almost 90% of this glorious city was devastated after WW2, but like the proverbial phoenix, it has risen to become one of the top developed cities in the world. A story of the true human spirit here.

Next was that day that had a deep impact on me. After leaving our train at the Oranienberg station, we walked the same route taken by the thousands of imprisoned Jews, political prisoners and other petty prisoners of the camp daily to be taken for hard manual labor to factories, farms, ammunition workshops and construction activities. The peculiar heaviness in my heart began as I retraced the steps of hundreds of emaciated, impoverished, tortured, beaten and starved innocent people as they walked with their heads hung low, steps heavy and leaden, stomachs empty and the butt of rifle inches away from the limbs and torso that would bear its brunt, lest a step fall slow or even for no reason at all.

A drab grey wall, all of twelve feet high and barbed, enclosed the camp area. The wall is now covered with photographs of atrocities, camp inmates, the fearful SS army, the loads of corpses and the survivors that were rescued at the end of WW2 giving us a glimpse of what was inside. The imposing gate proudly proclaimed, “Arbeit Macht Frei” (Work sets you free), apparently a sign on all the gates of nearly hundred concentration camps that were active during the Nazi regime. It gave a sense of hope to all the inmates who kept feeling that if they worked hard, they will be set free and that’s how they continued to rot, waiting for that sliver of hope. The gate opened to a vast ground, now empty but lined with rows of areas like sunrays that once housed the barracks. Just before the barracks was the main office notoriously called the dehumanizing center, where the freshly arrived inmate would be stripped of all dignity, paraded naked and given the first dose of the horror that was to come.

The barracks, now just three have been reconstructed to show the appalling living conditions, housed tens of thousands of people with a capacity of less than five hundred. The long halls on either side of a central wash room section had rows of wooden bunk beds where up to seven people would be cramped in a space for two. The washroom was a common room with three large water fountains that were to be used by all in a matter of few minutes. The toilets for ablutions was a single room with rows of commodes placed next to each other with no screens or doors. The dehumanization was complete!

According to a plaque on the barrack, the bell for waking up would go on at 4.15 am and in fifteen minutes all the inmates had to wash and clean up, and rush to the central ground for a head count that would then take them for the day’s grueling work. Any person, feeble, old, disabled or ill who could not keep up with the rush of humanity moving towards the washing area would be trampled upon and left to rot in excrement’s of others or to die! There was no other route to hell. The counting of prisoners would be conducted in the open ground and could take few hours. In winters with temperatures falling below zero, people would get gangrenes of the toes and fingers by just standing in the snow waiting for their number to be called, that resulted in amputations at the apothecary, loss of usefulness for the regime and a certain death by torture! The long march would then begin with soldiers shouting, screaming and mercilessly hitting helpless people. It was a dance of death and cruelty that went on and on for almost six years.

The other end of the camp housed the most dangerous areas, the crematorium and the ‘neck-shot’ area where unsuspecting people were made to stand for height measurement in front of a scale that had a hole which corresponded with the neck of the victim through which a guard shot him. Apparently designed to reduce the post-traumatic stress of SS men who shot them!

Diseases proliferated, sickness enveloped the air over the camp, screams of pain and hurt rented the air that was enclosed in a high double barbed wire. Experiments for liver and blood diseases were conducted on innocent and healthy people in the specially built human laboratory in the camp. Doctors, architects, engineers, mathematicians, bakers, florists, watch makers, butchers, drivers, teachers, lawyers, laborers, just anyone who was not fit to live in the society that the Fuhrer was trying to create, or anyone who was a threat to the regime was brought to one of many such camps, tortured mercilessly and either shot dead or made to suffer till he died. Six million Jews, political prisoners, homosexuals, criminals, and mentally or physically disabled people were deemed unfit and had to go through the horror of survival till death came as a relief.

I was numbed by the immensity of the whole crime. I was dulled by the intensity of the torture humans can inflict on one another. I was appalled at the psychological conversion of the minds of millions of people by one psychopath, to make them believe that they are wronged by a certain people and they must cleanse the world of this. I was horrified at the nature of torture that can be designed by the same human mind that also paints, sings, draws, thinks, cries, hurts and loves.

It was that moment in my life that showed me the sunshine that has filled me. The blessings that one gets not to even know about such dark areas of humankind are immeasurable. I was deeply humbled to see that the challenges and the ups and downs that seemed huge and daunting to me were infinitesimally small as what people have gone through those who lived through this horrible time. I was also terribly ashamed of falling weak at times or even being scared in front of trying situations that were not even a millionth of what these innocent souls have faced during holocaust.

It also brought me face to face with the strength of the human mind. The astounding stories of holocaust survivors were proudly emblazoned on the museum walls. The courage shown by these brave-hearts in face of raging fire was unparalleled and has become a beacon of hope for the entire mankind across the world. The body can withstand only that much, but the mind is capable of withholding a deluge of gigantic proportions and adversities helping the body to stand even as torrential storms rip the body and uproot the self.

The thing called hope is the greatest gift to mankind. It is the only single force that drives the beaten, tortured, torn soul through that dark tunnel into light. In all the mayhem of holocaust, I saw this legacy left behind by millions of people, strong and weak, for generations to come.

The world I was born into is definitely a better place and a better time for the free spirit which we come with. History keeps getting repeated in small doses across times, but by and large, the humankind today believes in live and let live.

I am grateful for this life in this world in this time.   

I am very, very grateful!