What Genocide Looks Like

I’ve always been interested in why people do terrible acts. I think it is a downfall of humans that we have the ability to commit such atrocities. It is not something that is often talked about, but events like the Holocaust and the Rwandan Genocide, confuse, scare, and fascinate me. I often wondered how could a human be driven to do something so heinous? In the Fall semester of my Junior year I decided to take a class solely on Genocide, POLI 383: “Genocide: A Comparative Perspective”. While I knew this class would likely be upsetting, I couldn’t let my emotions deter me from learning more about something I was interested in. Therefore, I registered for the Genocide class and found every article, topic, and discussion extremely riveting. Little did I know I would later see and use these ideas, facts, and theories while I was studying abroad in Rome, Italy, and traveling throughout the European Union.

 

In my class, Genocide: A Comparative Perspective, we studied different types and events of genocide. We learned that while genocide is a crime against humanity it has different characteristics that make it genocide as opposed to just murder, like an organized attempt to eliminate an entire population of a specific group. Examples of these characteristics can be seen in my UN op-ed paper for class. In this paper, I wrote about the Muslim Rohingyas. There experience is comparable to what I am talking about because they too have been targeted as a ethnic group subject to horrible crimes and genocide. As seen on page two and in my last paragraph, I explain how the UN Report I examine in the paper, shows evidence of genocide occurring to this group. I also explain how these crimes against the Rohingyas are criminal, but due to their nature and the nature of the event occurring to the group they qualify as genocide.

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While I was in Europe, I visited many countries affected by the Holocaust. I traveled to Amsterdam to see the Anne Frank house, Germany to see Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site, and even the Jewish Ghetto in Italy. In my classes I was always told about the atrocities that happened during the Holocaust but never really understood to what degree they impacted the people and places they touched. It was during my travels abroad that I fully understood the magnitude of the events that took place during the genocide of the Jewish people during the Holocaust.

 

 It was in this class that I learned and began to actually understand that many events lead up to the Holocaust. It wasn’t just one day Hitler decided to start the systematic killing of Jewish men, women, and children, and then people followed. He had planned this out. It was a series of rights violations until the German people were so numb and accustomed to treating the Jews a certain way that they followed in the horrible acts that took place during the Holocaust.

 

One of the first rights that the Jewish people were revoked of in Amsterdam was the right to ride a bike. When I read this in The Diary of Anne Frank in middle school I thought: “so what, you can still walk places” and “what grown person used a bike anyways”. It wasn’t until I arrived in Amsterdam that I truly understood the degree of this restriction. In Amsterdam everyone rides bikes. Not just the children for fun or college kids to class, everyone. I remember almost being hit by a bike multiple times just within the three days of visiting the city. It is now that I realize that this was a very demeaning and restricting law. Hitler took away the right to an almost Dutch custom, as I saw it in Amsterdam. He stripped them of a right which was one of the leading events to start genocide as talked about in class. Hitler continued to strip the Jewish people of their rights throughout the lead up to the most atrocious human rights violations.

 

In this class we read also about the moving of the Jewish people into separate housing still within the city while they waited to be transported or killed. These “ghettos” were described as little cities within the cites. They had bakeries and shops just like the rest of the town but were only for the Jewish community. In class we read a book, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, by Christopher R. Browning that talked about how frequently the gestapo would ride into these areas and round up the next batch of Jews to be executed or move into concentration camps. I visited one of these ghettos during a tour and the facts that I learned from my genocide class were once again reinforced. It was unreal walking through what seemed to be a quite area of town, to think that so much horror and anxiety once lived here. These areas of the town look exactly like the rest of the city, and if I hadn’t of been on this specific tour, I would have likely never known there stories. In Rome, where I visited the Jewish ghetto, the gates and fences had been removed but there was still a considerable difference between this area and the rest of the Eternal City.

 

In this area the homes were basically built on top of each other. There were bakeries and cafes, however our tour guide told us that the cooks within these restaurants had little to work with. They would go to the local market (during times they were allowed to leave the ghetto) and pick up scraps of vegetables and meat. They would then cook with whatever they could however they could. These creations are now considered traditional Jewish meals in Rome and are still served to this day in the same establishments. Our guide also explained to us how the ghetto in Rome was located in an area that was notorious to flood, and that during times when the gates were locked the area would frequently be under water.

 

Walking through this area and hearing our guide explain the conditions of the ghetto further reinforced the facts that I had read and studied in my genocide class specifically about a theory called: collective ethnic categorization. This is Dr. Scott Straus’s idea that when genocide occurs members are placed in groups where they lose their individual identity. This is significant because it helps explains how it would be easier to kill someone you knew if you saw them in a different way when genocide occurs. For example, taking away of a human’s rights and being placed in a prison like community would strip a person of their individual identify and cause those not in that same situation to view them a collective group and not an individual person. This helped people justify killing or turning their back on Jewish people. They saw them as a collective ethnic group not as their neighbor, friend, or teacher as they did before the Holocaust began.

 

Another fact learned in class that was further reinforced during my travels abroad was the inhumanity of concentration camps. While in Munich I took a day trip outside of the city to Dachau, to the notorious Dachau Concentration Camp. In class we had seen pictures and read about concentration camps and the terrible conditions there, but it wasn’t until I was standing in the middle of a gravel field surrounded by 20+ ft barbed wired fencing that I understood what had happened here. During the tour we learned just how over populated and grossly inhabited the concentration camps was. We were told via an audio tour that the camp was originally built to hold about 6,000 prisoners but on liberation day some 30,000 prisoners were freed. This was unbelievable to me, especially after seeing just how small the area was.

 

I realize now that I never would have really connected to this material presented in my genocide class if I hadn’t seen and understood it on a first hand level. Of course, I still would have understood and realized the level of atrocity that happened in Europe during the Holocaust, but certainly not to the degree that I do now. Because I toured the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, walked through the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site in Germany, and toured the Jewish Ghetto in Rome, Italy I now see the Holocaust on an even deeper level and understand it’s affects more fluently. While there was no doubt in my mind that these events took place or that these places existed, after visiting them and seeing for myself I now cannot comprehend how people still do not believe the Holocaust ever took place.