I remember how horrified I was when I was
taught about the Holocaust. I was 11 at that time and my wonderful history
teacher not only explained what happened but showed us some documentaries and
played some audio tapes of survivors.
Naturally, we were made to believe that the
entire German nation supported both the Nazi regime as well as the policy of
sending Jews to concentration camps. There were lessons on the Nuremburg trials
and the punishment handed out to those who operated the death camps.
I was also made to believe that in a
defeated and divided Germany that people immediately shunned the ideas of the
previous regime. I carried this thinking
right up to my adult life, until a conversation a few years that began on a
much lighter note.
I was living in Bangalore at that time and
had a German friend. While an auto driver tried to rip us off one night, we
refused to pay and the man in a fit of anger called us “bloody North Indians.”
The assumption was that my German friend, with his dark black hair, was a
light-skinned Indian from Kashmir or Punjab.
When I met his mother who also has jet
black hair and recounted this incident, she said the reason they had black hair
was that her biological father was a Hawaiian GI who served in Germany, but
left soon after the war.
She then spoke about how grateful she was
that her mother’s husband accepted her. In those days, “children of the enemy”
were looked upon as virtual untouchables. As our conversation went on, she gave
me a glimpse of life in post-war Germany.
Stig Dagerman, one of Sweden’s greatest
writers and journalists, was in Germany as a correspondent for a Swedish paper
in the autumn of 1946. The articles, he
wrote, were compiled into a book titled ‘German Autumn.’ His approach to
reporting what he witnessed was thoroughly professional and at the same time he
showed a great degree of compassion.
He was disturbed by the way Western
journalists wrote judgmental and triumphalist articles about the German people.
He called out those who asked a starving family if they were happier in the
Nazi days. Of course, a person who is under the worst duress would answer in
the affirmative.
What touched me most about the writing is
the fact that he did not look at rubbing in the suffering of the German people.
He writes that suffering is suffering whether deserved or undeserved and his
compassion purely came from seeing that people were suffering.
Dagerman who was in his mid-20s at that
time, vividly captures the occurrences of the time, including the way Bavaria
was deporting people to other parts of Germany and how poor women were throwing
themselves at Allied soldiers and journalists. He also noted how some former
Nazis with a dark past managed to thrive under the new system.
The book is probably the best account of
immediate post-war Germany ever written.
It also helps the reader become less judgmental of an entire
nation. I can’t help but agree that
suffering, whether deserved or not, hurts and that we all need to be
compassionate.
