Among the Reeds

by Tammy Bottner

  This still begs the question of why millions of people believed this twisted tale and cooperated in the atrocities. Psychological studies have shown that “normal” people can turn sadistic when given absolute control over others. In 1971 a landmark study was conducted by Philip Zimbardo at Stanford University. In this disturbing experiment, a group of college students were split into two groups, and randomly assigned to “be” prisoners or prison guards. The guards were dressed in uniforms and given absolute control over the “prisoners.” Within hours the guards turned cruel and sadistic toward their charges, harassing them, humiliating them, and making them do pointless menial tasks, with punishment if they “misbehaved.” Perhaps more disturbing, the “prisoners” quickly became submissive and docile, exhibiting “learned helplessness,” accepting whatever punishment the guards doled out. This submissiveness in turn seemed to fuel the guards’ sadism. Both groups, the aggressors and the persecuted, quickly adopted the “new normal” behaviors of their peers. The experiment was meant to run for two weeks, but after only six days the psychologists had to terminate the study because one researcher realized it was creating a cruel and abusive situation. Zimbardo later noted that he himself did not think to object to what was going on in the “prison.” He later stated that he found himself thinking as a prison warden rather than as a psychologist. He too had bought into the new normal reality.

  The ramifications of this experiment are deeply troubling. It is terribly disturbing to realize that we humans harbor a dual nature. Capable of extraordinary kindness and good, we also, unfortunately, are capable of extraordinary sadism and evil when we find ourselves in an environment that supports those traits. And it does not take long for us to adapt to considering another group of people, who days earlier had been our friends and peers, to be inferior and deserving of derision and abuse.

  Hitler and his evil empire brought out the very worst side of human nature, with tragic results. In Belgium, even though the Nazis proceeded relatively slowly in their persecution of the Jews, by the fall of 1942, half the Jewish population of Belgium had been rounded up and deported. Another 8,000 Jews, including those of Belgian descent, were rounded up and deported in 1943, rescinding on the promise Hitler had made to Queen Elizabeth that her own Jewish citizens would be safe.

  Their belongings were confiscated by the Nazis and transported back to Germany as liebesgaben, spoils of war. Not only were Jewish businesses and homes seized, and used by the Germans and their collaborators, but every valuable object – jewelry, art works, furniture, and home goods – was taken too. This fiscal rape was all part of the Nazi final solution.

  Genocide is not new. It had happened time and again prior to World War Two. Nor, sadly, did it end with the Nazi effort to exterminate the Jews. The twentieth century would unfortunately see genocide again, in Cambodia, in Rwanda, and in the Balkans. But the obsessive, maniacal effort that the Nazi party put into annihilating the Jews was unprecedented and has not been equaled since. The construction of an entire infrastructure devoted to documenting, finding, concentrating, transporting, and then gassing and burning six million people, more than a quarter of them children, is impossible to fathom.

  For example, the Holocaust claimed the lives of 99.5 percent of the Jews living in Ukraine alone. The chances of surviving the war in this part of the world were abysmal. Over a million Jewish men, women, and children – some estimate more like one and a half million, comparable to the entire population of a city such as San Diego, Phoenix, or Philadelphia – were systematically and brutally beaten, tortured, starved, humiliated, and finally killed. And that number is just in Ukraine. An entire culture was wiped out – a whole world of quirky dark humor, as well as the Yiddish language, destroyed in five years.

  Large numbers can be difficult to grasp. How do you comprehend the death of over a million souls? The 9/11 terrorist attacks killed about three thousand people in the U.S.A. If a horror like that happened every day for a year, that would approximate the number of Jews killed in Ukraine during the Holocaust. And if you imagine a 9/11 disaster happening every day for the entire five years of World War Two, with three thousand people dying every one of those days, you would still be half a million short of the six million Jewish deaths at the hands of the Nazis. And – additionally, of course, many other people lost their lives during this terrible time.

  The plundering of the Jews’ possessions did not end with their death. Guards (or even worse, Jews recruited for the job) scavenged the bodies, pulling gold teeth from the victims’ mouths, and sifted through cremated remains looking for jewels the dead may have swallowed before they were killed. Everything of value was confiscated for the Nazis’ use.

  The Nazis robbed not just the Jews of their humanity; they robbed everyone else of their fundamental decency, in fact of their humanity, as well. Everyone, Jews and non-Jews, was thrust into the impossible choice of either cooperating, or at least passively accepting, the barbarism of the Nazis, or risking their own and their family’s annihilation. This was the reality under this savage regime. The Germans made it clear that not only would resisters be brutally punished, but their families would be too. From a comfortably removed perch seventy years later, it is easy to judge.

  In such circumstances, it is amazing that still there was a small minority of incredibly brave Resistance fighters who risked everything to fight the fascists, and in doing so salvage their own essential humanity.

  The Belgian Resistance movement was comprised of many branches. One, the Independence Front, established the Comité de Défense des Juifs, the CDJ. The CDJ became the main source of protection for the Jews of Belgium, and was responsible, among other tasks, for finding hiding places and organizing the safekeeping of thousands of children. Of the eight founding members of the CDJ, seven were Jewish and one was not; but within a short time many more non-Jews joined the effort. The Independence Front considered the rescue of Jews to be an integral part of their work, and carried this work out under the auspices of the CDJ.

  Another of the CDJ’s enterprises was forging ration cards and identity papers. The forgeries were so successful, in fact, that the CDJ ended up with more than they needed. They were able to sell the surplus to other resistance movements, as well as to individuals, and to use the money to finance their underground work.

  As the roundups began in 1942, parents were faced with this decision: keep their children with them, or give them up and send them into hiding. Many, of course, chose the latter, including Genek and Melly. In sending their children off, hopefully into safekeeping, parents were trusting that their children would escape deportation should a roundup come to their door. At the same time, they realized that they themselves could more easily disappear underground if their children were not with them. Adults could more easily hide than could families with young children. The horror of such a choice is beyond imagination, and speaks volumes about the dire circumstances of the times.

  Only the “lucky” ones even got to consider such a choice. Many families were rounded up during the earliest raids in 1942, sent to the detention camp in Malines, and from there deported to the killing camps. They never had a chance to hide, to go underground, or to try to save themselves or their children. My father's Uncle Herman, Aunt Sally, and cousin Joachim, were among that group.

  The Jews of Eastern Europe were in even more dire straits. Countries such as Czechoslovakia and Poland were the first to be annexed by the Nazis and the last to be liberated. The Germans were in control there from 1939 to 1945. Compared to countries such as Belgium, the Nazis had two to three additional years of rule in which to implement their sadistic agenda. It was in these countries – as well as in Germany and Austria, of course – that Hitler experimented with ways to shame, intimidate, torture, and kill.

  In addition, as mentioned, the local populace in many of those countries was extremely anti-Semitic and tended to readily join in the torment of their Jewish neighbors. It is not an accident that the Nazis set up the ki
lling camps in Poland. The virulent anti-Semitism there, and the willingness of (most) of the locals to cooperate in annihilating the Jews, made for a fertile place in which to sow the seeds of evil.

  After the war, the very few Jews who had managed to survive were of course homeless and penniless as well as psychologically and physically traumatized. Often having nowhere else to go, some tried to return to their home villages or cities. Many times they knew their families had entrusted valuables to non-Jewish friends and neighbors before entering a ghetto or being deported. Some Jews had buried jewelry and family heirlooms in the ground near their homes, attempting to keep it safe for “after the war.” Survivors straggled back, hoping to find some remnant of their family’s belongings and to recapture a bit of their fractured lives.

  These sorry Jewish refugees, having lost all family and friends, and after being subjected to unspeakable horror and brutality in the camps, were – for the most part – met with further hate if they returned home. After years in exile, the return was a cruel and lonely homecoming, devoid of familiar faces, empty of familiar landmarks. There are heartbreaking accounts of Ukrainian and Polish nationals hissing at returning Jews, spitting at them, expressing shock and dismay that they were still alive. Most Jews found their families’ homes and belongings gone – confiscated by their neighbors – never to be returned. Sometimes confrontations broke out, and turned violent. More than one Jew, having somehow survived five years of imprisonment, torture, and unspeakable horror, was killed by villagers upon returning to the place they had once called home.

  In addition to physical harassment – the registering, policing, and rounding up of the Jews – the Nazis used other, psychological weapons, and these were perhaps even more sinister. By robbing people of their basic rights – taking away their livelihood, their community, their religion, their homes, and their families, and later their clothes, even their hair – they stripped the Jewish people of their sense of their own essential humanity, rendering them helpless, hopeless, and vulnerable. Vulnerable, terrified people will do whatever they can to feel safe and to survive, including cooperating with the enemy. The Germans, treating Jews as subhuman, forcing them to hide like animals in dens, tried to demonstrate to the world that Jews were useless vermin, ripe for extermination. For some, this became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Sadly, but predictably, some Jews started seeing the Nazis as masters, and themselves as helpless slaves, dumb animals, meekly submitting to any atrocity.

  People have a strong and primitive survival instinct. Frightened Jews became increasingly desperate to avoid the wrath of the Nazis and, hoping to survive, did whatever they were told – no matter how horrible or degrading. If told to register, they did. If told to wear gold stars on their clothes, they complied. If told to report for work duty, they showed up. If told to be at a train station at a certain time, together with their children, they were there. If told to dig mass graves before they were shot and pushed into them, they did that too. Told to either help out in the crematoria or end up inside them, some Jews cooperated with the enemy, and helped run the killing camps. This didn’t save them, however; most eventually suffered the same fate as those who had gone to the gas chambers before them.

  Even after witnessing the brutality of the regime, desperate Jews still hoped that by cooperating with the Germans they would be saved. In 1943, the Nazis managed to “flush out” many of the remaining hidden Jews by announcing that Belgian Jews should now return to their homes, that they were exempt from further actions. Wanting to believe that the worst was over, many came out of hiding. They were, of course, picked up in the next roundups and deported.

  It was the rare person who decided not to comply with these orders. It turned out that it was precisely that rare person whose instincts told him not to register, not to wear the star, not to report for work duty, to ignore the many mandates the Nazis imposed – it was that person who would survive. It was those whose instincts told them to hide, to blend in – and who made a thousand lucky choices – who lived to tell the horrific tale of what happened in Europe during the war.

  A Child’s Experience of the Holocaust

  Possibly the most difficult story to tell in this book has been that of my father, Bobby, and his experiences in hiding as a very young child.

  A young child experiences time in a very different way to an adult. When you have only been alive for two years, another two years is literally a lifetime.

  Young children are meant to be loved, to be nurtured, and to have a lot of sensory input – sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and touch. They learn by exploring their environment, by exploring their senses. Their brain development depends on this input. The world in which Bobby found himself was deficient in all of these areas. The world of the Jewish children hidden in a convent was one of sensory deprivation.

  Their room was in the basement, poorly lit, sometimes completely dark. There were no toys, no bright objects, no sunlight, no green plants, no crayons, no paint, no picture books. There were no windows to look out of. Bobby recalls the world existing in shades of gray. He experienced a world deprived of color and visual stimulation. He literally forgot that color existed. His first memory of noticing color is after the war. His years in the convent were gray ones.

  The nuns insisted the boys keep quiet. If the Germans came around, as they sometimes did, they must not hear the sound of childish voices, they must not be alerted to a room of hidden children. So Bobby and the other hidden children lived in a world of silence, deprived of music, of song, of normal human voices other than the occasional whisper. Perhaps the nuns responded to the children’s cries, perhaps they didn’t. Children raised in orphanages where their cries are ignored eventually stop crying. Decades later, in Romania, psychologists noted that in orphanages in that country there existed an eerie silence: rows of babies lying soundlessly in their cribs. There was no point in making sound if nobody listened, nobody responded. Bobby’s years in the convent were silent ones.

  Food was scarce. The children were fed enough to be kept alive, but there was no exploration of the sense of taste. Maybe they received some lumpy porridge, some stale bread, some tasteless soup. But their diet was deficient, both nutritionally and sensorially. Of course, there were no sweets or treats. Food did not exist as a sensory delight; the children were lucky to have some caloric intake, and that was all. Bobby’s years in the convent were hungry ones.

  Taste is intimately connected to smell, and in the underground world of the convent there was a paucity of scents. No flowers to smell, no aroma of baking cookies or roasting chicken, not even the scent of a spring rain or the comforting aroma of a mother’s skin for these children. The only smell was one of damp, of mold growing on the walls of the convent.

  And finally, not enough touch. Children thrive when they are held, hugged; they need human touch to develop. The hidden children of the convent received only perfunctory touch from the nuns who cared for them, but they missed out on the intimacy of being lovingly held. Instead, they lived in a cold damp environment, with insufficient clothing to withstand the winter chill. They had no cozy blankets or stuffed toys to cuddle, no sand to sift through their fingers, no grass to explore with their toes, no warm body to nestle into. The lack of loving human touch was perhaps the worst of the sensory deprivations for the youngsters.

  Young children need not just sensory input, but love and attention in order to grow and develop normally. Institutionalized children do not grow properly: their height, weight, and head circumference measurements are usually too low, a condition called “failure to thrive.” Even with adequate nutrition (which the hidden children did not have) the lack of intimacy prevents children from growing. They are literally stunted by despair. Additionally, institutionalized children often exhibit delayed speech, poor fine and gross motor skills, intellectual impairment, abnormal socialization, atypical behaviors, and a host of psychological problems. They do not develop normally, either physically or emotionally.

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p; Children who grow up in large orphanages may not have access to what they need at critical times in their development. Babies require a unique bond with their mother (or another adult) in order to develop empathy and normal social behavior. This is called attachment. Babies with abnormal attachment in infancy have a lot of difficulty forming normal relationships later in life.

  Luckily for Bobby, his first two years of life had been spent in a loving family environment, allowing his most critical development to occur normally. But for the next two and a half years he was cut off from loved ones and insufficiently fed, and he existed in a cold and lonely world of sensory deprivation. He did survive, but the stress of the ordeal no doubt left its mark on his psyche, his health, and – as the discussion of epigenetics shows – also on his genes. These genes would be the ones he would someday pass on to his own children. We cannot know for sure exactly how the genes that he passed on might have been altered by his experiences. But unquestionably, such trauma, such sensory and emotional deprivation, so early in his life, profoundly influenced who Bobby was as a person, and it is certainly possibly that this influence was profound enough to affect his genetic inheritance.

  The Complicated Politics of Palestine/Israel

  After the horrors of the Holocaust, there was one crucial event that rose from the ashes of World War Two: the formation of a Jewish homeland in Israel. After two thousand years without refuge from oppression, the Jewish people finally had a place of unconditional sanctuary.

  The land of Israel is tiny and it is vulnerable, but the fact that it exists at all is no small miracle. To understand the complicated politics of the region and how Israel came to be, it is necessary to review a little history.

  At the end of World War One, the British, victorious over the Ottoman Empire – which had fought on the German side – ousted the Turks and assumed control over much of the Middle East, including the area called Palestine. This small strip of land had been coveted and fought over for millennia. Sacred to Christians, Muslims, and Jews, and right in the middle of the trade routes between Africa and Asia, wars and turmoil had repeatedly wracked this tiny geographical space.