8/9/2019 The Children Who Never Lived

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THE CHILDREN WHO NEVER LIVED

Wandering around the green hills and valleys of Parc des Buttes-Chaumontin Pariss busy and crowded 19

thdistrict (which I wrote about in an earlier

post), one comes across this neat, slightly anonymous-looking green stele,with its troubling image of two hands reaching in vain for one another. Its amonument to the 423 Jewish children of the 19

thdistrict who were sent to

their deaths in the concentration camps during the WWII German occupationof France, and in particular to the 33 children who were too young even tohave started school.

As a matter of fact, one discoversplaques and steles to these vanishedchildren all around this area of Paris:theyre outside most of the schools andin many public squares. While the Nazideath machine which became morefrenetic as the war went on and asGermanys eventual defeat becamemore certain claimed French Jews

from all walks of life, the inhabitants ofNorth-East Paris were among the mostvulnerable and defenceless. Recent

immigrants or refugees, poor andalready dispossessed, barely speakingFrench in many cases, what chance didthey stand when even the wealthy andwell-integrated Jews of the affluentwestern districts, French citizens formany generations, were stripped of theirproperty and possessions and forced towear the despised yellow star?

And what fragment of a chance did theirchildren stand the most vulnerable ofthe vulnerable, therefore the ones whom its our implicit duty as humanbeings to protect and defend when this incomprehensible madness wasraging all around them?

I dont know that we can enter into the mental world of people who areprepared to send not-yet-weaned children to be exterminated because oftheir racial origin, or even if we should try; its something which only a few

writers have attempted, and with very patchy success. Perhaps the novelist E.M. Forsters injunction to onlyconnect doesnt apply in this uniquely appalling case; perhaps the duty to oppose it in all its manifestationsoverrides any need to comprehend it, let alone to empathise.

Because this kind of mindset does continue to manifest itself, albeit usually in less extreme forms. Im notreferring merely to outbreaks of genocidal hatred such as those in Rwanda or former Yugoslavia, but to any andevery time that an idea or ideology takes such possession of peoples minds as to override compassion, humilityand even common sense. Im referring, for instance, to the so-called birthers in the United States who areconvinced despite all the evidence that President Obama was born in Kenya, and that hes an alien interloperbent on imposing totalitarian socialism. Or the Chinese ideologues who claim that the Dalai Lama is an evil andpower-mad plotter seeking to undermine the unity of the Chinese nation, or the followers of that religion whosevery name means peace but who claim that it justifies the murder of non-combatant women and children orso many, many others. Most of the misery that people have inflicted one each other stems from this unfortunatedeformity of the human mind, whereby we can elevate an idea, a mere construct, above all the other impulses,emotions, experiences and impressions which go to shape our actions. Its something which we all need to

8/9/2019 The Children Who Never Lived

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