Just recently, I was watching a program about when the British allies liberated Bergen-Belsen death camp in Germany shortly before the end of the Second World War in Europe. The liberators filmed it. What they filmed was truly horrific. It was like a scene from a horror film, rather than something that actually happened. The SS men (SS, abbreviation of German word “Schutzstaffel” which means “Protective Echelon”) were being made to carry bodies of grown men and women (the very men and women they had killed) to mass graves in order to be buried.
The horrifying factor was that, as a viewer, you could not tell, which was a man or a woman they were that skinny. Their faces were haunting. The eyes had sunken in so far you could not imagine that they once led a life of going to work, having children, going on holidays, traveling etc…. It made me cry and it is haunting me until now.
I have studied the world wars. I have studied about the Holocaust. I know what happened. However, those images just made it into a reality that no one ever wants to believe a human could be so cruel as to treat another human in that way. Unfortunately, the final solution of the Nazi regime was not the only Holocaust recent History has witnessed. Genocide in Cambodia, Rawanda and Sarajevo are just three in our recent History that have been allowed to take place. Millions have died at the hands of pure evil and hatred.
What about today?
Why is this relevant in today’s world? Because today’s world is getting increasingly more like “that” world. We only have to read right-wing media, which dominates the majority of the world news these days, we only have to read many comments about refugees escaping their own horrors to understand that people are not as sympathetic as we wish. We only have to read newspapers to see some of the horrible, discriminative actions that are being done to single out those people who have escaped their horrors for a better life elsewhere.
Recently, I read two stories where Syrian refugees were being singled out in their communities so people knew where they lived. In Cardiff, UK, assylum seekers are made to wear brightly color wrist bands, which they are told they cannot remove, otherwise they will not be able to get food!
In Middlesborough, UK, assylum seekers are living in houses, where the contractors have painted their doors bright red so everyone knows that they are assylum seekers!
A new controversial law in Denmark, allows the police to seize refugee’s assets to help pay for their stay and settlement in the country!
All of these actions are reminiscences of what happened in Nazi Germany. Jews were made to wear a yellow star to show that they were Jews. Their assets were seized by the state. Before the concentration camps even existed, their shops were smashed up, their books were burned.
If we ask today what is the differences between Nazis and those who single out refugees ? They will make excuses that they need to be made identifiable so they don’t just feed anyone, and to make sure they are able to stay and pay their way. However, their excuses are weak, poor and pathetic.
These people are fleeing their own country, where they’ve been attacked by their own Government on one side and other extremists like Daesh (ISIL) on the other. They have done nothing wrong, yet they are taking the brunt of the fears and scaremongering of right-wing media and political parties to make people afraid that these people are just coming to their countries to slaughter all non-Muslims or to spread Islam.
It is sickening. It is sad. It is heartbreaking. They just want a better life for themselves and their children. Some of the horrific things that these children must have seen in their own war-torn country must be so harrowing, we cannot comprehend. Instead of having compassion and empathy, we treat them as if they are the reason why the world is falling apart.
As a British woman, I feel ashamed when I read such stories. I’ve always thought we were much more fairer than this. To see what is happening now makes me so angry, sad and heartbroken. These people have endured enough. They have witnessed horrors we will never witness, Alhamdulillah, and yet they are made to feel like they are the bottom of the barrel in a country that apparently prides itself on diversity!
These extreme xenophobic attitudes are exactly what Daesh (ISIL) want. That is how they get their power. That is how they get their new recruits, because when the young people watch such inhumanity, they get so angry and bitter that they are being brain-washed by such extremists who claim to be defending Islam. Why can’t we wake up to see that? Why can’t we wake up to understand that these prejudices are exactly what these idiots want?
71 years later from the liberation of death camps in Nazi Germany, it seems that history has not taught us anything. All we need to hear is some charismatic leader speak, throw a few untruths in his speech, but make them seem true, and we all clap and cheer like a bunch of buffoons clinging on to his every word.
Why don’t we learn from our mistakes instead of letting History repeat itself over and over again? Until that happens, I am hanging my head in shame and I feel disheartened that this is the world my own daughter has to grow up in.