Fascism grows in crises. And it triggers crises to thrive. Anyone who has studied the history of fascism can say that with a certain degree of authority. And anyone who has been following the happenings in India in the last few years can certainly spot signs of it.
But it’s really in the last couple of weeks that tell-tale signs are showing: signs that something is terribly wrong and that something even more terrible might be in the offing. This is not a message of doom. It’s a word of caution.
We are living in dangerous times. And some of what we are experiencing today was experienced by people in Nazi Germany in those early years of that fiendish regime.
As many as four BJP-ruled states did nothing to uphold an order passed by the Supreme Court, overturning bans on the movie Padmaavat that some of these governments had imposed. If you remember the past election speeches of Prime Minister Narendra Modi in these states, he used to urge the people to vote for the BJP as a BJP government would fear him and listen to his word and therefore do better work.
That assertive promise was very timidly reneged on by the Prime Minister. And the Indian press, very timidly, let that pass without caring to even let out a whimper of protest.
So, how did we come this far? That’s a pertinent question to ask. The answer isn’t simple, though. It was because people attempted to rationalise hate crimes against minorities. It’s because people didn’t react when MPs, MLAs and Union ministers made communal and criminal remarks. It’s because the boss of a vigilante group was allowed to become the CM of a state and people kept on saying, “Give him a chance”.
Hate crimes have become so frequent that even the press has started giving them less attention. Two people in Dima Hasao district of Assam were killed in police firing during an anti-RSS protest. Yet it didn’t find a front-page mention in any national daily. Similar items are being buried in the inside pages every day.
“These things happen” is becoming the common refrain of people who, in fact, criticise the press for publishing every “minor” incident to convey an impression that things are not fine in Modi’s India. “It’s a foreign-funded media conspiracy to derail the good work of Modi ji,” says your friendly neighbourhood uncle-ji, who has an opinion about everything from frog species in the Western Ghats to “paramilitary gangs in monkey suits”.
Another person says, “Anti-India and anti-Hindu pseudo-secular communist journalists want to show India in poor light to the world. Their hatred for Modi ji is so much that they are even willing to betray India.” He is your pal from school who now mints big money in a plush office in Silicon Valley, but when you question his narrative, he tries to shut you down by saying, “Stop commenting from the comfort of your AC room.” It’s a different thing that he tells you all that from his plush AC room.
The Indian press should have been pilloried for not doing its job properly; instead, it’s drawing flak for its temerity to carry even single-column reports on lynchings, or briefs on Assam shootouts.
This is how the German public used to react too when the Nazis were in power. Newspapers that initially showed some spine to report the truth about the Nazis were dismissed by the party as well as the citizenry as a “Jewish plot” to malign the Third Reich and the Fuhrer.
Remember this always: the Holocaust didn’t start in 1933; there was a gradual build-up of over a decade that culminated in the Final Solution. Before the actual genocide came the language of genocide; before the actual ghettos and curtailment of rights of the Jews, communists, gypsies and homosexuals came the language of inequality; before the concentration camps came the literature that called for the segregation of Jewry.
A Holocaust survivor once recalled that “it was very gradual”. Had it happened in a flash, her “father would have certainly left Germany for Britain or America”. Her parents and siblings didn’t survive. But she was rescued by the Red Army when Auschwitz-Birkenau was liberated on January 27, 1945. She spent nine months in that hell.
Yes, in case you didn’t realise, today is the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. An anniversary that all of us in India should never forget. The way humanity was shamed in the extermination camps of Treblinka, Sobibor, Majdanek and Auschwitz should never be allowed to forget.
Because when you forget that, you let people who say “a Muslim has no right to a seat” in a train get away. You let people who announce a bounty on the head of a filmmaker and an actress on primetime television get away. You let a Union minister, who attends the funeral of a lynching accused whose body is draped in the national flag, get away.
So, on this anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, I am bringing you some images from the past so that you can understand that it was possible to stop the Holocaust from happening only if the people were more vigilant.
A gradual build-up
The first photo is of race laws being taught in school. German children are taught to identity the “filthy Jews” and “true Aryans”. To drive home the point, Jewish children were often made to stand in front of class as lectures on race were delivered to humiliate them and to make their fellow students understand that it was all right to humiliate Jews.
In this 1935 photo, two German Jewish kids are made to stand in front as the teacher writes on the blackboard behind: “Jew is our greatest enemy. Beware of the Jew.”
Elsewhere in Austria, the Nazis were stopping Jewish professors and students from attending colleges and universities and carrying out protest marches against the “Jewish press”. The two photographs show Nazis forming a human chain at University of Vienna and protests against the press.
When people became comfortable with these ideas came the outlawing of Jewish businesses and stores. The next couple of photos show how Jew-owned stores were branded for other Germans to stay away.
A little later, open humiliation of Jews started. In these images, you could see German soldiers cutting off beards and hair locks of Jewish men to humiliate them.
Then Jews were packed off to ghettos. This one’s from Baden Baden where Jews are being marched and abuses hurled at them in 1938.
The next bunch is from Lvov in the Soviet Union where Jews were harassed, persecuted and murdered by Ukrainian nationalists and Nazis after the German occupation. Nazis are openly molesting a woman. We don’t know if she lived or was killed.
Then finally, the Nazis arrived at the ‘Final Solution of the Jewish Question’. In one pic, you could see Jewish women being dragged into a forest to be shot by the SS in the Soviet Union.
Another shows an SS Eisantzgruppen soldier getting ready to shoot a Soviet Jewish woman as she tries to protect her child.
The next image shows another Eisantzgruppen squad eliminating Jews in the USSR. The one after that is the most haunting one. It shows a Jewish man in the Soviet Union kneeling down on the edge of a pit already filled up with bodies, waiting to be shot by an SS man. This was at Vinnitsa in the Ukrainian SSR.
Next, I have for you a cross section of a larger photograph taken by the SS during the roll-call of women prisoners at Auschwitz-Birkenau. This photograph was taken immediately after their hair was clipped shortly upon their arrival at the death camp. They were mothers, daughters, sisters and wives. We don’t know if any of them survived or got to see their families. But their hair did survive.
The marked packet that you see in the next image contained hair stored to be transported back to Germany to make thick socks for German troops and others, Felt for shoes, toys, brushes etc.
This packet was among the hundreds (total weight of about 8 tonnes) found by the Red Army’s 1st Ukrainian Front of Marshal Konev when it liberated Auschwitz.
The next pic shows horror writ large on the faces of the two women at the front. They had just arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau, probably Hungarian Jews. They perhaps knew what awaited them. But the women at the back are seen smiling. Gullible ladies who probably didn’t know what was coming or were trying to keep their chin up amid the adversity.
The child clinging to its mother seems clueless.
The next pic shows people waiting in a wooded area behind the crematoria at Auschwitz-Birkenau. They were all told that they would be “disinfected” first. Some definitely knew what that meant; most others didn’t. The crowd here is in queue to be gassed.
Information about these atrocities had been supplied to the Western Allies by Polish and Soviet partisans right from the time these had begun. But they had refused to believe them.
Finally, when Soviet forces started pushing back the Germans, they discovered the shocking reality of the scale of atrocities that they committed. The Red Army had shared photographic evidence with the Britain and France. But both had refused to believe in all that, thinking that the “highly professional” German military could never resort to such brutality and be foolish enough to leave a trail of evidence in case they did.
The Red Army had invited an international press corps to see the Majdanek concentration camp with all its ghastly gas chambers, half-burnt bodies in the attached crematoriums and heaps of emaciated bodies outside. The BBC had refused to carry the report while the New York Times had buried it in the back pages, being suspicious of Russian claims and believing all of it was Soviet propaganda. Denial at its worst.
At Aushwitz, the liberators found many children. The lucky few who had survived but had suffered immense hardships and torture. Children barely able to walk, many who had only learnt to walk not long before they were brought to the camp. The last three photos show the children, all of whom carried tattoos and not names. Some were rescued from trains, from among heaps of people dead or dying.
“Something like this will never happen in India,” a good friend told me a few days ago. May his words be true. But let us not be complacent. Let us ensure that we never take the same path. But let us also recognise the fact that this is what hate does to very “normal” people and transforms a society into something unrecognisable in a very Kafkaesque way.
Source : TOI