Bodies carried ashore from boat tragedy
Hedy Bohm is 86. When she was just 16 she was transported to Auschwitz from her home in Romania. The experience has haunted her life. But she is a survivor, and this week she travelled to Germany to give evidence at the trial of Oskar Gröning.
He too says his life has been haunted by what he witnessed in the Nazi concentration camp. Gröning is a survivor too; but he was wearing an SS uniform, not a grubby uniform with a yellow star.
Oskar Gröning was one of 6,500 SS men in Auschwitz: 43 have been charged with offences, and only 25 have been convicted. It is a pretty sorry record.
Hedy is hoping to see Gröning behind bars. It was his job to take luggage from the Jews, Roma, homosexuals and other men and women branded ‘degenerate’ by the Nazis. Having lost their liberty, they were then deprived of the last few things they treasured.
Imagine what would have been in those suitcases: imagine you were forced to flee your home. What would you take? And what would you leave behind? That will not be much of a stretch of the imagination for some. Within recent history there were refugees in Belfast, and we are living still with the consequences of that mass movement of people.
In his defence, Gröning says he was just “a small cog in the machine”. And maybe he was. But more than a million people died in Auschwitz – he is charged with complicity in the deaths of 300,000 – and there is not much time left to bring the perpetrators to justice.
Hedy Bohm knows what she thinks of his excuse. “Whether you’re a bookkeeper, a supplier, a driver, a cook, whatever you are, if what you’re doing helps the machinery of death of a regime to keep rolling, you should be called to account. No one should ever be allowed to say ‘I was just a small cog in the machine’.”
There is nothing to compare what happened in Germany with what is happening on the seas between Africa and Europe. But there are parallels, and the scale of human suffering is truly horrifying. Not a week goes by without some tragedy.
Refugees, asylum seekers, and economic migrants are the labels we put on the victims in an attempt to distance ourselves from the reality that they are men, women and children – no different from ourselves.
And through the indifference of governments that we elect, they have been exploited by traffickers who herd them on to ships unfit for animals.
Europe has turned a blind eye to their plight – primarily because we do not want them to be a ‘drain’ on our resources. The British and Irish governments are complicit.
Indeed, the machinery of European states has been mobilized to repel those who are trying to come to our shores for safety. It is the equivalent of relieving pressure on the NHS by telling the police to stop sick people reaching hospital.
Last year, Europe closed its search and rescue mission on the pretext that it encouraged people to have a go at crossing the Mediterranean.
The International Organization for Migration believes 30,000 could lose their lives there this year – the number trying to cross is growing. Last year more than 3,000 deaths were recorded. The 800 who died in the sinking on Sunday – many locked below deck – brought this year’s total to almost 2,000.
One of the few world leaders to speak out on behalf of the victims is Pope Francis. This week he called on European governments to provide sanctuary for the victims, to stop the traffickers, and to deal with the underlying issues that have created the crisis in the first place – war, greed, power politics, and poverty.
His has been a lone voice since the early weeks of his pontificate. His first pastoral visit after his election was to the Italian island of Lamperdusa – just 80 miles off the coast of Tunisia – where he prayed for the victims of traffickers and called on governments to act.
Condemning the “global indifference” to the plight of refugees, he said we had lost our sense of “brotherly responsibility”. His words have fallen on deaf ears. But they apply to us all.
In one way or another, we are each a “small cog in the machine”. It is time to act. It is time to pressurize our governments to put the lives of vulnerable people above national self-interest.