In early 1946, my parents--who'd spent most of WWII being involuntarily transported across the former USSR on Stalin's trains--returned to their native land of Poland. Everything and everyone they'd ever known had vanished. They were soon swept up by a Jewish rescue and relief organization. By 1947, they were living in a Displaced Persons (DP) camp in Germany.

Although it was hardly comfortable, the DP camp restored some semblance of dignity to their lives. For the first time since the 1930s, they had a secure place to live. They had medical care. They could attend religious services. They even got some money. It was enough to buy food, and the dishes to eat it on too. They could afford bedding and new clothes. At the time, these were all unimaginable luxuries to them.

They lived in the DP camp until 1949, while my sole American uncle worked to get their papers cleared and their visas granted. There was discord in the camp and grief and madness, as you would expect among the starving, battered survivors of war. And it was in Germany, source of their misery, and in a particularly horrible place in Germany.

But for the most part, those years that gave my parents and thousands of other war victims in DP camps across Europe a chance to find their feet again, to live under the protection of a benevolent government (the US, the great benefactor of European war victims), and most important of all, it gave them the opportunity to feel human again. Their basic needs were met. The gnawing terror they'd endured for almost a decade began to fade.

The place? Bergen-Belsen, one of the most notorious German concentration camps, where untold numbers of prisoners were tortured and killed. It is ghoulish to think of the Jewish survivors living in the renovated buildings of a concentration camp that American soldiers had liberated. But how and where else could a huge population of homeless emotional wrecks be housed?

And so the place which once had been a hell for Jews became, for a time, a haven where they could heal from the war. It was at once a magnificently practical and philanthropic gesture by the American command.

Fifty years later, the US went into Iraq and took over a different kind of hell. Instead of a concentration camp, we liberated Abu Ghraib, where Saddam Hussein--often compared to Hitler--tortured and killed prisoners.

What an opportunity it would have been for us had we turned that place into housing for the thousands of people left homeless by our bombs, or the victims and families of people who had been tortured by Hussein. Instead, we chose to let the spirit of torture and degradation live on. Indeed, all we really did there was to change the name of the management. Abu Ghraib is a bigger shame now than it was before, a bigger blight on humanity's moral spirit than Hussein could ever have made it. We expected an evil man like Hussein to run a place of evil. We never expected it of America.

May 21, 2004 in Autobiographical Urges, Current Affairs | Permalink

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I'm not very political. I distrust all politicians. For that matter, I distrust most people. For that matter, I'm not that crazy about the Windows operating system, SBC Ameritech, and any food that uses the word "Lite" on the packaging.

However, the Abu Ghraib situation has apalled me.
The fact that it happened wasn't surprising. War taints. War corrupts. This is a historical fact. Even for an administration staffed largely by men who have never seen combat, it was blindingly stupid of them not to know this.

To make matters even worse there have been the pathetic excuses offered by the administration. The self-congradulatory speech-making, even in the face of photos of tortured men and stories of mysterious deaths and disaperances. The smug, casual disregard for basic human rights expressed by the Bush administration will only make things worse. Much, much worse.

The politicians aren't the ones who are going to to pay for this, though. It's the average American soldier who will pay of it. They will be the ones who will be killed and mained in revenge ambushes.

The average American tourist or civilian will also pay. Not today, but one day somebody who watched their loved ones killed by U.S. bombs or bullets will channel their rage into one grand horrible act of retribution. The tragedy of September 11th, 2001, may pale into insignicance compared to some future act of vengeance. For that one, part of the blood will be on our hands.

The Bush administration has betrayed everyone. They have betrayed the Iraqi people. They have betrayed the civilized nations of the world. They have betrayed the democratic ideals the truest Americans have always tried to stand for. And they have betrayed our country's best and brightest: the fighting men and women of the U.S. armed services.

What really galls me, is that you just know they'll all retire with big fat pensions, books deals, and speaking tours. The only ones who will ever be punished by the system will the ones who were brave enough to blow the whistle on the whole ugly mess.

Posted by: Nightheron at May 22, 2004 12:25:52 AM

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As a soldier, I am disgusted and ashamed by the unfolding prisoner abuse scandal. The first weeks of basic training are spent in a classroom and a big part of this is learning about the Geneva Conventions, including the treatment of prisoners. That was all the training *we* got on this. The American soliders at Abu Ghraib are MPs and they get even more specialized training on handling prisoners. I know it's been said before but we know better than this!

Another aspect that's pissing me off is that all the soldiers who are being courts-martialed are *reservists* and enlisted. Not one active duty soldier or officer is going on trial. I've served on both sides of the fence and can tell you that this is going to be awful for morale. No one can tell me that officers either were unaware of the abuse or ordered it, or both. I expect to see a couple of low-level officers thrown to the wolves in the next week or so.

I like your idea, Glory, of turning Abu Ghraib into housing and I wish we'd done it, or something like it. Instead, by choosing to abuse and torture prisoners in the same prison where Hussein did the same things, we have lowered ourselves even further in the eyes of the Arab world. That was something I didn't think was possible. I had known that your parents survived the Holocaust but had no idea they'd been in a DP camp at Bergen-Belsen. It's an amazing chapter of our history and one I wish we'd remembered.

Posted by: Eric at May 22, 2004 8:53:58 AM

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