Now much of my TV is out of the corner of my eyes these days, as I sit at my computer more often than on the traditional sofa of yore. So this is how I saw what I saw. No graphic images as such. Just the calm and measured tone of the narrator - as well as that of some still inevitably shell-shocked interviewees.
The bit of the programme I caught described an apparently "illegal" and "devolved" lead-up to the gas chambers, which were of course later sanctioned and constructed with the full complicity and intentionality of the Nazi regime and its leaders. It described how from relatively small beginnings - using "hell vans" to gas small numbers of gypsies with carbon monoxide - the experiment was extended to Jews who lived in the locality. One lady villager was interviewed describing how the cries of those dying under such circumstances were heard across the village. Her face was a picture.
Not a picture you'd like to see.
And the most shocking thing about it all was that apparently - as I pointed out above - these initial experiments, these examples of what we might crudely describe as "genocidal DIY", were carried out by someone (I didn't catch the name) who took it on himself to push the envelope of evil off his own awful bat. Somewhere, then, in some place amongst that regime of punctilious civil servants, they had found time to record that the authority and line of command did not entirely register as it should have done. Which didn't - even then - stop them from going ahead with the experiment.
No matter. In the event, it wasn't to be long before it was proven an interpretation of a wider score - a sick symphony of prejudiced harmonies which soon enough claimed for itself a right to decide who could exist and who could not.
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Over Christmas, my wife and my daughter watched the Spanish version of the "The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas". Even as the viewers' desires to hurt the wickedness of the Nazi regime, as exemplified by the father in the story, lead us unerringly into the narrative trap the film sets, we cannot but sense a terrible duality at the end.
Punishment, whilst sometimes inevitable, as well as unavoidably just, surely also requires us in each and every case to dig two graves.
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And if I remember what I saw rightly when I watched that snippet of that documentary this week, the almost Heath Robinsonian aspect of the - at the time - small events I saw described showed how easily from petty infamy humanity could reach a morally corrupting industrialisation.
In a sense, perhaps, then, the Nazi Final Solution was nothing more nor less than a logical consequence - even where not inevitably so - of the brutalisation of human relationships which the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century incited us to.
For we are still little more than serfs under the thumbs of all-commanding lords. Even as we have the daily opportunity to use mediums such as this to not only defend but also try and extend our freedoms.
So if you have forgotten, just a little, and maybe daily life makes us all do so from time to time, take some time out to read this from Wikipedia - and remind yourself what's really at stake.
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