Shannon Ebrahim
One of the reasons why we, as human beings, have never learnt from history is because we refuse to put ourselves in the shoes of others and try to understand what they have been through.
Whether this is understanding what the Afrikaners were subjected to during the Boer War, or understanding the trauma which resulted from the largest mass murder in the history of mankind – when the Nazis attempted to exterminate the Jewish people.
The reason why history has a way of repeating itself is that we have failed to learn these histories, their impact, the lessons, why it happened, and to whom. And beyond learning, to empathise with the suffering of the other.
In the famous book To Kill a Mockingbird, Atticus Finch turns to his daughter Scout and says: “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view… until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.”
Many of us are guilty of this, and even I have been guilty for most of my life of denying my partial Afrikaner heritage, out of a rage for what the Nationalist Party did to black South Africans under apartheid. It was only when some of my extended family visited South Africa last month that I joined them to visit the grave of my Afrikaner great-grandfather, who is buried near Ficksburg in the Free State.
I have always had in my possession letters he wrote from a British concentration camp at Sea Point in 1900, but I never knew much more than that. But the visit to his lonely grave in the middle of a drought-scorched mielie field outside of Ficksburg made me realise the importance of learning and understanding more.
Not only was he starved at the concentration camp at Seat Point, but he was transferred to St Helena – where Napoleon had been incarcerated almost a century before – and he remained there for the duration of the Boer War.
He eventually returned to Ficksburg to find that all his six brothers had been killed by the British, and most of the families in the area sent to concentration camps. The visit to Ficksburg came not long after one of the most emotional visits abroad I will ever make, and that was to Auschwitz in southern Poland.
I thought I was prepared for what I would see as I had studied the history of the holocaust of the European Jewry at university in Canada, and had watched most of the movies that came out about the holocaust over the past 30 years. I had also visited Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Israel, the Jewish museum in Venice, and the newly built holocaust museum in Warsaw. But visiting Auschwitz is something you can never really be prepared for.
It was the naked barbarity, the cruelty, and the indifference to excruciating human suffering that brings you to your knees. There is a building in Auschwitz which houses exhibits of what was left of the last Jews who were exterminated at the camp, and no human being can witness those scenes without becoming emotionally distraught. Encased in glass along one wall are the spectacles of thousands of people, and in the next room are hundreds of thousands of shoes of all kinds piled high behind the glass. The piles continue down the length of the corridor.
The exhibit which brought me to tears was the masses of human hair encased in glass, and not far from it the masses of suitcases of those who thought they were arriving at a labour camp – their names and addresses from countries across Europe still clearly visible.
The worst and ever enduring image that will forever haunt me was the room of children’s clothes and tiny shoes, preserved so that future generations would learn from history.
Not long before I visited Auschwitz, a professor from Jerusalem’s Al Quds University, Dr Mohammed Dajani, took a group of 27 Palestinian students to Auschwitz to study the Holocaust and teach tolerance and empathy. Dajani was convinced that his Palestinian students needed to learn about the Holocaust as it was historically wrong to deny it and morally wrong to ignore it.
The students who spoke about their experience at Auschwitz said they had a whole new understanding of their conflict with the Israelis. At the same time as their visit to Poland, a group of 30 Israeli students had visited a Palestinian refugee camp, in order to learn and understand what the Palestinians call the Nakba – the expulsion and dispossession of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their land, and their ongoing suffering and trauma.
At the end of the day, if we want an end to the cycle of repression and genocide, whether in Africa or the Middle East, opposing communities will need to go the extra mile to understand the historical and current trauma of the other.