Hitler's Children

I saw this really good documentary on Netflix the other day - it's called Hitler's Children - a conversational-styled movie with dialogues with the surviving children/grandchildren of the topmost (and hence the most fearsome) officers of the Nazi regime and some of the first and second generation holocaust survivors.

It deals with issues of the burden of carrying a fear-inducing surname - the feeling of guilt, responsibility, embarrassment, shame. The most powerful moment of the film for me was when the grandson of the Auschwitz camp commander visits the camp on a day when a survivor from that very camp is also visiting. The grandson is asked to answer a few questions by the tourists, and as he struggles to hold back his tears and give dignified responses, this survivor walks upto him, hugs him tight and says, "You were not there, it was not your fault. That was another time." I still get goosebumps recalling that scene. The grandson completely broke down - was it a closure or not is debatable. Did the survivor feel that having met the next generation of his perpetrator and forgiving him, he can move on - forgive and forget? Did the son feel that having got that acknowledgement from a person who lived through the camp atrocities is a befitting closure to the years of guilt and shame? I do not know.

The documentary made me wonder on the larger question of what family legacies and surnames do to an individual's life. Obviously, they have greater bearing if there is real greatness or tragedy associated - but how do children deal with it. I am sure sons and daughters of politicians and actors in the current world have it easy - do they really have a "burden on their shoulders", I think not. Ditto with business men. (Pardon me for my dismissive tone.) But imagine being born to parents who have been responsible for killing millions or some other negative impact that history can never forgive and forget - what do you do? Would you "renounce" the "name" or would you "live" with it?

Endlösung der Judenfrage - Holocaust

The worst gang wars of all time – Nazis against the Jews in the 1930s and 1940s under the rule of Führer, as Adolf Hitler was known - is a testimony to the most abysmal depths to which the human race can ebb. Genocide of approximately six million European Jews and systematic annihilation of millions of people in other groups including ethnic Poles, the Romani, Soviets, and political and religious opponents as part of a program of deliberate state-sponsored extermination planned and executed by the SS (Schutzstaffel) army in Germany is what every human being, irrespective of religious, political and national boundaries, should be ashamed of.

And this is the context of the book I just finished reading - Holocaust by Gerald Green, based on the critically acclaimed NBC-TV series by the same name.

Through the fictional accounts of two men caught on the extreme spectrum of this catastrophe – Erik Dorf, officer in the Nazi Army, swept up in a frenzy of murderous rage and Rudi Weiss, a Berlinian Jew, the anguished victim, the author traces the bloody trail from Berlin to Warsaw to Russia to Czechoslovakia to Prague to Israel, unfolding the searing and contrasting saga of the two interlocked German families.

Green spares no gory detail – the destruction of European Jewry, the confabulations of the architects of Hitler's Final Solution, the slaughter at Babi Yar, the impoverished ghettos, the death trains used to export Jews, the concentration camps, the gas chambers, the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and finally, the liberation of Auschwitz. He chronicles how euphemistic phrases such as Endlösung der Judenfrage (German for ‘the final solution to the Jewish question’), resettlement of Jews, autonomous Jewish territories, among others, were used as means to one end – mass obliteration of a whole race. Add to this, the complete apathy by religious and humanitarian institutions, governments and media organizations across the world.

If Holocaust is a story of extreme hatred, it is also a mesmerizing tale of passionate love. It captures the heroism and courage of the some few who fought to live and died with dignity. In its dismal setting of unparalleled monstrous deeds, it strives to keeps alive the hope in the spirit of human relationships.

The narrative brings alive the sadness beyond tears of the lives of the millions perished for no apparent logical reason, and though there is a sense of survival and triumph towards the end, one realizes that it comes at too exorbitant a price and with too many scars that even the waves o f time may not be able to alleviate.