THE CHILDREN WHO NEVER LIVED

Wandering around the green hills and valleys of Parc des Buttes-Chaumont
th
in Pariss busy and crowded 19 district (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 a
th
monument to the 423 Jewish children of the 19 district who were sent to
their deaths in the concentration camps during the WWII German occupation
of France, and in particular to the 33 children who were too young even to
have started school.

As a matter of fact, one discovers

plaques and steles to these vanished
children all around this area of Paris:
theyre outside most of the schools and
in many public squares. While the Nazi
death machine which became more
frenetic as the war went on and as
Germanys eventual defeat became
more certain claimed French Jews
from all walks of life, the inhabitants of
North-East Paris were among the most
vulnerable and defenceless. Recent
immigrants or refugees, poor and
already dispossessed, barely speaking
French in many cases, what chance did
they stand when even the wealthy and
well-integrated Jews of the affluent
western districts, French citizens for
many generations, were stripped of their
property and possessions and forced to
wear the despised yellow star?

And what fragment of a chance did their

children stand the most vulnerable of
the vulnerable, therefore the ones whom its our implicit duty as human
beings to protect and defend when this incomprehensible madness was
raging all around them?

I dont know that we can enter into the mental world of people who are
prepared to send not-yet-weaned children to be exterminated because of
their 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 only
connect doesnt apply in this uniquely appalling case; perhaps the duty to oppose it in all its manifestations
overrides 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 not
referring merely to outbreaks of genocidal hatred such as those in Rwanda or former Yugoslavia, but to any and
every time that an idea or ideology takes such possession of peoples minds as to override compassion, humility
and even common sense. Im referring, for instance, to the so-called birthers in the United States who are
convinced despite all the evidence that President Obama was born in Kenya, and that hes an alien interloper
bent on imposing totalitarian socialism. Or the Chinese ideologues who claim that the Dalai Lama is an evil and
power-mad plotter seeking to undermine the unity of the Chinese nation, or the followers of that religion whose
very name means peace but who claim that it justifies the murder of non-combatant women and children or
so many, many others. Most of the misery that people have inflicted one each other stems from this unfortunate
deformity 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
guard against.

Lets pause a while to reflect and to shudder, and, in the moving words of the stele in the Parc des Buttes-
Chaumont: Passer-by, read their names. Your memory is their only burial.