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“We Just Didn’t Know”
By Nancy Greggs
Over the years, I have come to know many concentration camp survivors. Needless to say, these people were angry and bitter, with good reason, about many things. But nothing would set off that anger more than hearing a German citizen, or someone who had lived near the camps during the war saying, “We just didn’t know.”
Most of us have seen the old newsreel footage of their reaction to the films and photographs of the camps after the liberation. “We thought the Jews were living on farms. We thought they’d been relocated to other countries. We thought they were segregated into their own communities, and that’s why they’d disappeared from our neighborhoods, our workplaces, our schools.”
“But THIS? No, we just didn’t know.”
In actual fact, many people did not know. Not because the evidence wasn’t there, not because they didn’t hear the rumors about what had happened to their Jewish neighbors who were taken away never to return, not because those close enough didn’t notice the greasy texture or the foul stench of the smoke that emanated from the ‘work farms’ located near their towns. But simply because they chose not to know.
And now, God help us, we have the same thing happening in our own country on the issue of torture.
How many self-proclaimed good German Christians saw Jews rounded up and arrested, and said, “Well, they must have broken the law. They must be thieves, or rapists, or murderers.” How many self-proclaimed American Christians are now hearing about the torture of Muslims and are saying the same thing?
“The Jews are bent on destroying the Christian way of life, so they’re simply getting what’s coming to them.”
“The Muslims are bent on destroying the American way of life, so they’re simply getting what’s coming to them.”
It’s the same message, the same excuse, the same choice of blissful ignorance.
“So what if a Jew is tortured, if he gives up information about those who are enemies of the Reich?”
“So what if a Muslim is tortured, if he gives up information about those who are enemies of the United States?”
How many were led down the path of self-righteousness from believing that torturing one was a matter of self-preservation to eventually accepting that torturing the many, guilty or not, was a matter of justifiable expediency?
How many chose to believe that all of the Jews in concentration camps were guilty of something, and therefore deserved their fate? How many Americans now choose to believe that every detainee held at Gitmo, or in a secret prison somewhere, must be guilty of something, and therefore deserve the treatment meted out?
“Adolph Hitler is a good man, who has the best interests of our country at heart.”
“George Bush is a good man, who has the best interests of our country at heart.”
How many 'patriotic' Germans said that then? How many ‘patriotic Americans’ are saying it now?
One could, and many undoubtedly will, play the numbers game. They would point to the fact that Jews were exterminated in the millions, while so-called ‘enemy combatants’ are merely tortured and abused in the hundreds, or the thousands, and do not necessarily die as a result of their mistreatment.
It seems a valid argument on its face. But has our country’s moral compass become so skewed that we would indulge in such semantics? Have we become so morally bankrupt that we would excuse this behavior based not on ethics, but statistics?
It would seem, after listening to the excuse-makers amongst us, that is exactly what we are allowing to happen.
Just as the truth of the camps was ignored by those who chose not to believe what their country was capable of, so the Bush supporters choose to ignore the photographs from Abu Ghraib. And just as the truth was exposed at the end of World War II, so the truth will eventually be exposed here.
How many Americans, who have willfully blinded themselves to what our country is doing and what it has become, will live with the guilt of having supported and condoned it by deliberately looking the other way? How many of our military – along with our lawmakers and elected representatives – will eventually say they were just ‘following orders’ from their political higher-ups?
And after all is said and done, I wonder how many Americans will deny their own participation, and their own guilt, with that sorry four-word excuse: “We just didn’t know.”
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