It has never happens once.
Writer and anti-fascist resister Jean Amery recalls viewing a newspaper article, which showed photos of "members of the South Vietnamese Army torturing captured Vietcong rebels." In the photos, Amery didn't recognize monsters among the South Vietnamese or the Vietcong rebels. What he did recognize stirred up memories of his days as a captive of the Nazism regime.
In Belgium, after the war, stands the National Museum where its creators, writers Amery, believe everything has been left untouched . That is, everything that occurred at the local concentration camp is featured in this museum.
Passing through the main gate, visitors enter what is "mysteriously" called "the business room." Here, in this room, Amery notes a picture of Heinrich Himmler on the wall and, covering a table, is the Swastika flag. The room is just as Amery remembers it: a "windowless" room with a single "red light bulb" making visible the "various iron implements" lying about. It was a room in which the "business" was, after all, "murder."
On that day in July 1943 when Amery, is brought to this room, he recalls not hearing any screams. At yet, there was horror. Something Amery is quick to remind his readers that he didn't have to imagine. He "experienced it." The horror of being tortured is his experience. And although he didn't suffer as others may have, for his pain "was relatively harmless and it left no conspicuous scars on his body," the horror of being in his space still haunts him.
In the room, murder is routine. Why should horror be routine? "Torture is the most horrible event a human being can retain within himself." The existence of the horror "can make no claim to singularity..."
As long as there are practitioners of violence.
The essence of the Third Reich was this violence of torture. Its practitioners "tortured because they were torturers, [and] they paced torture in their service. But even more fervently they were its servants."
The sadistic, for the perpetrators were sadistic, inflicted pain because they could do so. Horror becomes the totality of the victims' reality, writers Amery. Those conducting business in this room were nothing short of "bureaucrats of torture." The servants of violence went about "their business," amassing "power," holding "dominion over spirit and flesh," and indulging in orgies of "unchecked self-expansion."
The "antiman," that is, the perpetrators, remain in bodies of the survivors of torture, always and forever, "as accumulated horror."
The business room is ubiquitous" And yet, there's Portugal's Castle Elmina, sitting "atop a hill," "abandoned" now. Its history "impeccably whitewashed," writes Professor Howard W. French.
Far from abandoning the scars of that legacy of horror, it remains. Look there in the faces of Gazan children today.
You would think we would want to abandon this legacy.
