Voyeurism in Hell
Reflections on the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp
My first impression is the rural, sylvan beauty of the place. The area is still, and has been since the 1930s, a military training area, so it’s heavily wooded and undeveloped for miles around. The original Bergen-Belsen complex was converted to a POW Camp for Soviet soldiers captured in the initial German push into Russia in 1940-1941. On this particular day in September the sun shines unimpeded by clouds—a clear blue sky overhead, cool in the shade, wind rustling the leaves, which are just beginning to change, exhibiting a slight tinge of yellow and brown. The exhibit center is almost hidden among all this foliage—a surprising aesthetic feat considering its concrete structure and mammoth proportions, all hard angles and bright gray cement.
On entering, I’m first drawn to a video/film enclave immediately to my right. A large screen replays the stories of internees at Bergen-Belsen. The room has tall ceilings (over fifty feet by my estimate), and rectangular benches of humorless gray stand in three rows before the screen. The room, like the rest of the building, is devoid of decoration, cool and dark. The interior still feels like a prison, no softness or rounded corners anywhere. I sit, listening to the stories of two gentleman: Artur Berg, persecuted and interned for being homosexual; and Henry Abraham, a Jew.
Abraham made it out alive. Berg did not.
I walk the main exhibit, confronted by rows and rows of large ‘index cards’. These cards were worn on the necks of each prisoner and include biographical information, a prisoner number (which replaced their name), vaccination records and medical history, disciplinary records, and other various notes. One catches my eye—Ivan Zaparoski, a Soviet officer, a man who would have been roughly the same rank and age as me when I was a Marine Corps Officer. He likely didn’t make it a year. In the winter of 1941, malnourished and ill-treated Soviet POWs died at Bergen-Belsen by the thousands. Typhoid, starvation, and other afflictions left bodies rotting outside on the ground, too cold and too many to bury. Of surviving that winter, one former POW wrote years later:
Finally, winter was over. A spring-like sun was shining, it got warmer and the snow started to melt. The countryside around us had survived the harsh winter and was now reviving; in the forest, the birds were starting to sing again….Even the camp itself was bathed in a more friendly light by the soft rays of the spring sunshine. We remembered the dark, rainy and windy days of December and the frosty months of January and February like you would remember a terrible nightmare….In my mind, the noise made by a sea of thousands of people who had offered resistance during those autumn and winter months, had struggled to escape the claws of death and failed, was hanging over the camp. Their wails and moans, their suffering and their fears were once again rising up before me. The camp was silent and the huts were empty.
I return to the cards. The Nazis elevated, extended, mastered, and perfected bureaucratic efficiency. A system existed for everything. Questions could be answered with procedure. Confusion calmed by process. Chaos quelled with an index card.
The Holocaust, Zygmunt Bauman argues, was a feature, not a bug of modernity. “Civilization,” writes one historian, “means medical hygiene, elevated religious ideas, beautiful art, and exquisite music.” But, he points out, it also means “slavery, wars, exploitation, and death camps.” The arc of the moral universe bends toward justice only if we bend it that way. Otherwise, it can be bent into all sorts of crooked, evil, more efficient shapes. The concentration camps are not only monuments to remember, monuments to mourn, but also monuments to extreme bureaucratic effectiveness.
My thoughts return to those cards tied around their necks. And then I feel something bouncing against my own chest. I look down, surprised, expecting to see there a faded, tanned, slightly crumpled packet containing my number and conduct record and details of my last vaccination—instead I see my sunglasses. I pause, startled and revolted by the juxtaposition of my clean outfit and Ray Bans in such a place, against such a backdrop, reading about the torture, starvation, and humiliation of these men and women; it feels suddenly grotesque and voyeuristic, viewing the pain of others so clinically in this air-conditioned space.
Photo after photo shows malnourished prisoners, often naked. In some pictures they bathe in warm weather, delousing one another by pinching the small bugs until their hands are stained red by pus and blood. Other pictures show piles of bodies stacked in mass graves or piled in trucks awaiting unceremonious offload. Pile. Piles. Piled. These aren’t words that should be used in the same sentence with human bodies.
My mind wanders to the Herrenhäuser Gärten, a former palace and summer home for the Guelph family, a minor royal family headed by Sophia, Electress of Hanover, a family that birthed George I, II and III, all the way down to Charles III, who sits on the British throne now. The Gardens were constructed over a period of decades, into centuries, and include a wild, less cultivated Georgengartens, similar to Hyde Park in London, and the more well planned and maintained gardens, replete with statues, fountains, promenades, pathways, and areas for entertaining. One area in particular is a sensual tour de force. Nude, neo-classical Greek statues line the pathway and are not so much art as sculptural pornography. Not a single statue stands straight, all curved bodies and seductive poses. In one sculpture a young woman spanks a young man, who bends over her knee, his bare ass raised in the air, mouth open in delight and surprise.
Two places, barely 30 miles apart, where nudity and human nakedness depict such different means and ends.
In one, people were stripped of clothing and deprived of basic human dignity, their nakedness a mark of shame, humiliated by the Wermacht guards in this inferior position. In the other, lusty, supple bodies cast in contrapposto writhe over one another in sexual delight, their nakedness a mark of prestige, boasting of pleasure, pointing to power, lusted after by pre-modern royalty, celebrated in their elevated positions.
Once again, I feel the revulsion of being a voyeur.
At the back of the building, I stand looking out the floor-to-ceiling glass walls. Here is the only natural light, a light strong enough to illuminate the large hall. I gaze at the beautiful heath and grass that now cover mass graves. The heidekraut speckles the landscape in broad swathes, and generous strokes of lilac brush against the green countryside. Large trees have now grown up where there were once bodies littering the ground. And beneath these trees, gentle, dark shadows move with the breeze, shifting back and forth. When God ejected Adam from the Garden, he told him, “Cursed is the ground because of you,” but despite the atrocities committed here there doesn’t seem to be any trace of a curse. From dust they came—the Russians, the Jews, the homosexuals, the weak, the disabled, the outcasts—and to dust they returned, fertilizing the forest and trees and purple flowers. What does Nature remember of mankind’s sins?
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