How quickly we forget

I led a life that didn't fit the generation in which it was being lived, and I've come to realize how different my perspective is because of it, and how it only takes one generation for people to stop responding to things that should probably deeply concern them.

You see, while most people were done fighting the Nazis in the 1940s, I had the shit luck of starting this life more than three decades later in a country that was just then finally killing off its Jewish and other unlikables. They were a little late to the game. Everyone else had already stopped playing or was only giving 1/10th of the effort.

So, I ended up as a survivor of genocide an entire generation behind the others. It does do something to the psyche. In the pits of despair that it was, something as simple as someone pouring you a glass of apple juice becomes this clear and beautiful sign of the good and humanity that is in the world. It also leaves you realizing just how close to death and danger we really are.

Both sides of that very vast and wide range of human nature are impossible to forget once experienced.

Seeing as they were essentially Nazis, in the literal sense of the word (not the current BS meaning), it's not surprising that I was handed over to someone who shared their beliefs. In fact, that was written into their doctrine - they chose to give the kids to people who could raise them as the regime thought was appropriate, to see if we could be redeemed and utilized (and killing babies was really bad optics, even in that situation).

So, I ended up living with someone who took advantage of me, took advantage of a government position, took advantage of society - because they shared oppressive beliefs and thus saw no value in any of us.

Their own family had come to the United States as war criminals escaping persecution after WW2 in exchange for working on the behalf of the United States to share their knowledge and expertise, presumably to make the US more formidable. I was in the hands of - quite literally - Nazis. And worse, the family were government-employed scientists and politicians. There's no worse combination on this planet.

What I saw while living with them, what I saw them do to people, was very much in line with the science and politics they had displayed in war.

But I was living in a generation that was no longer so acutely aware, who had not been recent victims, who thought the war was over, who had a chance to look away and forget. Despite sharing the same space with them, I didn't have that privilege.

I sat there and watched my new family commit human rights violation after human rights violation, crime after crime, on US soil and abroad, hidden in plain sight in a country that was relaxed and in denial of danger enough to let it go on right under their noses.

I felt like I was still a prisoner, like a WW2 victim who had never left the concentration camp. The only difference was that the world around me was no longer aware. They continued to live their lives as the people I was with mainstreamed and normalized what had once been hidden behind barbed wire and tall concrete walls.

I could have screamed from the top of the tallest building and not been heard, because I was one of so very few in this generation with the acute awareness and knowledge that come with having experienced that beast firsthand, undiluted, and without the option of denial that comes with having only experienced relative safety.

This is one of the key factors behind why history repeats itself on such a regular basis. When the time is ripe for destruction, there are too few left alive from the previous cycle to remember and stop it. History books are great, but they cannot replace experience.

Last Edited by TlvmmCpoft on 10/25/2019 09:28 AM