Most Terrible Century
Colleen's poem, "No Way Out" touched a nerve in me.
It resurrected a sense of desperate entrapment that I remember from a movie about Edith Stein. Edith and her sister Rosa were arrested in a Carmelite monastery in Holland. They were guilty of simply being Jewish by blood. The fact that Edith had converted to Catholicism several years earlier and had taken her final vows in the cloistered Carmelite order meant nothing to the Nazi's.
At first the Nazi officer was relatively polite. The women were driven away in the comfortable back seat of a plush staff car to a distant location. Rosa, who had joined the Carmelite's Third Order, began to weep softly. The scene, focusing on the faces of the two women, is gripping with a sense of quiet terror. Edith and Rosa had "No Way Out." The viewer knows the story ends just a week later with the death of Edith and Rosa at Auschwitz. Edith was canonized by John Paul II in 1998.
Colleen's poem also reminded me of the newsreel films, shown in theaters across America in April or May of 1945, as the British and American troops discovered the death camps. I was just age 13. I have an undying mental image of stacks of emaciated bodies and of a few emaciated survivors. The Nazis ran out of time to finish the job.
At the end of his life the noted Political Philosopher Isaiah Berlin said of the 20th Century: "I have lived through most of the twentieth century without, I must add, suffering personal hardship. I remember it only as the most terrible century in Western history." I would amend one word to make it The most terrible century in WORLD history. In fact the East suffered as much or more than the West.
In the news recently were reports of massive Chinese demonstrations against the idea of giving Japan a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council. Why the protest?
The little known story goes back to Japan's unprovoked invasion of china in 1937. One published estimate puts the number of Chinese dead and wounded at over 30 million. Yet the Japanese have only barely and grudgingly acknowledged the terror and killing they had spread from China throughout the East Asian and Western Pacific regions.
The organized, deliberate killings of the 20th century, by one informed estimate, totaled 125 million people. Judging from the many reports and estimates I have seen I believe that the 125 million is understated. The Holocaust, estimated at 6 million dead, is part of this total.
Communist regimes have the highest total score divided between The Soviet Union and Communist China with China in the lead. Next are the Nazis and other fascists and then the Japanese. The Holocaust is but one story, among many, describing The Most Terrible Century in world history.
I have two important observations about the Holocaust projects (which seem to be everywhere.) The Holocaust was a great horror. However, it is a distortion of history to give the impression, intentionally or otherwise, that the Holocaust was the greatest or most lamentable disaster of the 20th Century. Many, including the Chinese, the Ukrainians and Russians among others can offer sound arguments why their disasters were equally horrible.
Secondly it is my impression that racial or ethnic prejudice is given as the primary reason for the Holocaust. This is true but far from the complete story. The sickness of the 20th Century was much deeper than racial prejudice. Much of the deeper disorder is still with us. But that is a topic for later discussion.
Humanity must hope that the lessons of the 20th Century can be learned well enough and soon enough to avoid making the 21st Century the "Even More Terrible Century."