Auschwitz, 2013

on the day I visited last December.  Chilling gusts of wind howled around the photo-familiar red brick barracks, and daylight faded to dusk not long after lunch.  It was not cold enough or dark enough, however, to deter throngs of curious visitors.  (“If you think this is bad, just come in the summer,” I was warned.)  As I jostled with my fellow tourists through the somber hallways and down into a basement gas chamber, I wondered: How many visitors really comprehend the enormity of what happened here?  After all, isn’t the point of the Auschwitz-Birkenau museum to instill a sense of collective horror so that something like this will never occur again on our watch?   Yet it has happened, and it is happening as we speak.   

Post-Nazi history, as we know, is replete with chapters on gulags, killing fields, tribal genocide and “ethnic cleansing.”  For real-time North Korean horror, read Blaine Harden’s “Escape From Camp 14.”    

A half-century ago, as the Cold War was raging, C.G. Jung wrote: “The Christian world is now truly confronted by the principle of evil, by naked injustice, tyranny, lies, slavery, and coercion of conscience. This manifestation of naked evil has assumed apparently permanent form in the Russian nation; but its first violent eruption came in Germany. ... Evil has become a determinant reality. It can no longer be dismissed from the world by a circumlocution. We must learn how to handle it, since it is here to stay. How we can live with it without terrible consequences cannot for the present be conceived.”  

I wonder if Jung imagined we would handle it with such indifference. The UN Human Rights council, motivated perhaps by Harden’s book, recently presented its report on the sordid North Korean labor camps that we all know exist but prefer not to think about, where unimaginable torture and starvation are run-of-the-mill.   As the late essayist Christopher Hitchens once put it, the country itself is a concentration camp. 

Some of the prisoners (namely innocent relatives of political miscreants) are there simply for “crimes of association.”   Others, including adults, were born behind the barbed wire and have never been anywhere else.   The world response to the human rights council seems to have been a collective shrug.  If any foreign government (other than China, which predictably dismissed the report as unfounded) felt compelled to react in a meaningful way, well, I missed it.  

George Steiner, commenting on the German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s conspicuous silence over the Holocaust, maintained that “we are always an accomplice to that which leaves us indifferent.”  

Fifty years from now, if we humans are still around, maybe North Korea will have starved itself to oblivion, and tourist operators from Seoul will be guiding visitors through the barracks of Camp 14.   And the visitors might ask:  “How did we let this happen?”

Birkenau, 2013

Auschwitz, 2013

Phnom Penh, 2008