To the children who never lived

Wandering around the green hills and valleys of the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont in Paris’s busy and crowded 19th district (which I wrote about in an earlier post), one comes across this neat, slightly anonymous-looking green stele, with its troubling image of two hands reaching in vain for one another.
It’s a monument to the several hundred Jewish children of the district who were sent to their deaths in the concentration camps during the WW2 German occupation of France, and in particular to the 33 little ones who were too young even to have started school.

In fact, there are plaques and steles to these vanished children all around this area of Paris: they’re outside most of the schools and in many public squares. While the Nazi death machine – which became more frenetic as the war went on and as Germany’s eventual defeat became more certain – claimed French Jews from all walks of life, the inhabitants of North-East Paris were among the most vulnerable and defenceless. Recent immigrants or refugees, poor and already dispossessed, barely speaking French in many cases, what chance did they stand when even the wealthy and well-integrated Jews of the affluent western districts, French citizens for many generations, were stripped of their property and possessions and forced to wear the despised yellow star?

And what fragment of a chance did their children stand – the most vulnerable of the vulnerable, therefore the ones whom it’s our implicit duty as human beings to protect and defend – when this incomprehensible madness was raging all around them?

I don’t think we can enter into the mental world of people who are prepared to send not-yet-weaned children to be exterminated because of their racial origin, and I doubt that we should even try; it’s something which only a few writers have attempted, and with very patchy success. Perhaps the novelist E.M. Forster’s injunction to “only connect” doesn’t apply in this uniquely appalling case; perhaps the duty to oppose it in all its manifestations overrides any need to comprehend it, let alone to empathise.

Because this kind of mindset does continue to manifest itself, albeit usually in less extreme forms. I’m not referring merely to outbreaks of genocidal hatred such as those in Rwanda or former Yugoslavia, but to any and every time that an idea or ideology takes such possession of people’s minds as to override compassion, humility and even common sense. I’m talking, for instance, about the so-called “birthers” in the United States who are convinced despite all the evidence that President Obama was born in Kenya, and that he’s an alien interloper bent on imposing totalitarian socialism. Or the Chinese ideologues who claim that the Dalai Lama is an evil and power-mad plotter seeking to undermine the unity of the Chinese nation, or the followers of a religion whose very name means “peace” but who claim that it sanctifies random mass murder – and so many, many others.

Most of the misery that people have inflicted one each other stems from this unfortunate deformity of the human mind, whereby we can elevate an idea, a mere construct, above all the other impulses, emotions, experiences and impressions which go to shape our actions. It’s something which we all need to guard against.

Let’s pause a while to reflect and to shudder, and, in the moving words of the stele in the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont: “Passer-by, read their names. Your memory is their only burial.”