Insects and the holocaust - a visit to the Uckermark

Calm, peace and quiet. I haven’t had much of either of those in a while. But the last few days and today especially were devoted to those three and nothing else.
Right now I’m sitting on a little white boat, which is very slowly turning itself around its anchor in a little bay in a lake in northern Germany. The sun has just fallen into the crowns of the trees lining the bay to the west and is beginning to bleed lightly as it descends down their stems. Despite the soft French music from my laptop, there’s only the sound of the wind in the trees, the birds’ night-songs and the barely noticeable sound of a tiny feather floating by on the water surface. The wind very suddenly picks up as the western trees’ shadow falls over the bay and is joined by soft sounds of rippling waves and an occasional fish rising and catching a bit of food from what for him must be the sky. Maybe a piece of bread left over from what I fed the ducks earlier (two mothers came to my boat one after the other, with five cute, weeny little ducklings each – I felt a bit like that psychologist with the ducks… Konrad Lorenz!).
Besides setting the boat in a gentle rocking motion, the just-awoken wind also has the positive effect of freeing me from the insects.
There’s two kinds of insects here: good and evil ones ( - don’t you love simplicity!). And there’s three of each variety. The evil ones are the sly and sleazy mosquito, and two others, both of which are of the same family, one being about three times the size of the other and thus having a particular liking for mammals larger than humans, such as horses (we call them “Bremse” in German). The smaller one loves humans all the more and stings terribly. The only good thing about it is that, compared to a mosquito, which is quite hard to hit, this one sits on your skin quite comfortably and isn’t bother that much when you move a bit, so it’s quite easy to slowly aim and then quickly squash it…
However, being a positivist, I’d like to concentrate a bit more on the insects of the ‘good’ variety that we can find here. The first and most impressive one of them is the helicopter-like dragonfly; it seems to be a sort of careless spy-plane of a sort. Careless, because it makes no effort whatsoever to go about its mission stealthily – quite the opposite, it comes quite close sometimes, mildly curious one might think, stands in the air as if time stopped, then hastily takes off again. But in all that it seems observant and recording and most of all – very elegant and becoming.
Less elegant, but no less charming is the butterfly. The way it flaps about so seemingly uncoordinated, gives the impression of a drunk Hippie – no matter whether drunk on alcohol, drugs or life itself (personally I like to imagine it being drunk with love). It’s the kind of insect that might occasionally fly into a wall, just because it was looking at the sunset rather than where it was flying. With it’s large, beautifully painted wings (that seem just a little too large for the small body to deal with appropriately), it is a little like a teenage party-guest that took the ‘smart summer’ dresscode a little too serious, wearing her mother’s flower-dress and the high-heels to go with it – both a few sizes too large – and then drank three glasses of champagne rather too quickly. She spends the rest of the evening sort of bumping from one group of people to another, with a big happy smile on her face, quite content in herself, but just a little too drunk to be taken serious or to be engaged in any kind of conversation. So she takes off in the middle of an attempt at the latter and wanders on… jumping gaily into the fields or just to another group of people standing around in the garden.
The third ‘good’ insect is a tiny flying beetle that has the unfortunate quality of being annoying. Whereas the drunken butterfly is, despite its oddity, truly charming and delightful (and one is immediately touched by the lightness of being that it radiates – its happiness, overwhelming joy and intoxication with life’s beauty seem without bounds), with this particular character one is as likely to feel delighted by it as one is to see the sun in an arctic winter. This beetle simply leaves me wondering – it’s motives for being so relentlessly annoying are beyond my understanding: it comes in little clouds of a few dozen fellow-beetles, appears out of nowhere and simply descends onto your skin (which is bathing in the abundant sunshine) and sits there. Just sits. Maybe it walks around a little under the marquise formed by your skin-hair, but then sits again. Sits, rests, … maybe waits - I don’t know! I put it in the ‘good’ category, because it doesn’t bite, pinch or pee on you, and it doesn’t seem to intend to do any harm, but it is invariably annoying and that fact doesn’t change, however good its intentions might be. It is in that sense like a socially inept friend, who clings to you in the most inappropriate moments and shows a sometimes-astonishing ignorance to inappropriateness. We all know those unfortunate characters – they’re never ‘evil’ or ‘nasty’ or anything, they might even be ‘nice’, but they’re hardly ‘good friends’, ‘entertaining’ or ‘polite’ to say the least. So imagine that kind of friend appearing with eleven of HIS friends – and they all think you’re great (in this case, they probably think you smell or taste great – or at least your skin does), so they all clingnn ot you like those silly plants that stick to your pants when you walk through the forest – or like this little beetle I’m talking about. So it is our pity that gives these creatures a reason to live. We pity them because they’re so inappropriate and so we excuse them for their behaviour and spend some time with them. Well, with a little beetle one has less pity, so you can’t help having to constantly shake, shiver or move your arms around your torso and head, as if you’re a mal-functioning helicopter yourself.


Well, apart from the fascinating world of insects, there is something else up here in the ‘Mecklenburgische Seenplatte’, an area also known as the ‘Uckermark’ that fascinated and moved me a lot and I'm sorry if this is a bit of a break from the above...
One of the many concentration camps of Nazi Germany was located here, in between the picturesque lakes, woods and villages. The KZ (concentration camp) Ravensbrück was for women only and ‘specialised’ on Roma and Sinti (Gypsy tribes from Eastern Europe and Spain). An estimated 135,000 women were held here over the six years of its terrible existence. I spent a whole morning walking through the area that marked the former KZ, reading all the plaques, visiting the buildings that are still standing and also climbing over some fences and wandering off into the grown-over barracks and brick-ruins that stood out of bounds for the visitor, trying to visualise what it was like then, imagining the hellish atmosphere, the unbearable weight of supreme suppression, the cold, the hunger –the screams, the ravished faces. Right next door was another camp (which in Nazi-nomenclature was called a “Youth-protection-camp”) also just for females – girls between the ages of five and sixteen. They had to get up at 5am, line up for morning register, then run for 20mins in their sleep garments, no matter whether +30ºC or -20ºC. The rest of the day was spent working to exhaustion with a half-hour lunch break with watery bread-soup. During their whole stay in the camp they were not allowed to speak to each other and if any form of contact was established, immediate punishment would ensue. As the Soviet troups advanced in the spring of 1945 the 'Youth-protection-camp' was closed and used as an 'extinction camp', where those women that were too weak to work were taken and killed.

Between 1939 and 1945 an estimated 40 000 women, girls and children died and were killed in the two camps.

I was thoroughly shaken by all this and spent the rest of the day contemplating how the hell that all happened, how the hell people could let it happen, part-take in it and not say: “These are people, too! They are humans and not objects or goods!”
The most terrifying thing about the holocaust – and I hadn’t ever noticed it as clearly as when I visited the KZ Ravensbrück – is the efficiency and pedantic thoroughness with which it was carried out. Noone and nothing has ever been exploited to the extent that the Jews were by the Nazi machinery – as a people, as human beings, as objects. In the first stage the right to live as a German citizen was taken from them and they were moved to specially designated ghettos, in the second stage they lost the right to live as human beings and were transferred to the camps, in which they were kept worse than animals and used as dispensable workforce. In the third and last stage, they lost the right to live and were killed by the hundreds of thousands.
Each transfer from one stage down to a lower one, was accompanied by a loss of certain material goods. In the first stage they lost their houses, sometimes stately mansions and villas, and received a flat in a ghetto and maybe a little compensation. From the first to the second stage, they lost most of their possessions, except for what they could carry on them as they were packed into the trains and what was not taken off them when they got off the trains. All the furniture, jewellery, fur coats, instruments, cutlery, books, artworks etc were then confiscated, neatly registered and re-sold by the Nazis. In the transfer to the last stage, they lost their last clothes, anything they still had in the camps and mainly: their bodies. Since they were going to die sooner or later anyway and since there was an ever-increasing number of them arriving in the camps as the war went on, they became objects that could be used without any consideration for wastage, for ‘wear and tear’ even. Their basic human needs (not to mention rights) became neglectable, because, technically, they were not humans as such. They were used like lab-rats for the famous medical experiments of Dr. Mengele and as cheap workforce for many now-famous German companies (in the case of Ravensbrück: Siemens), especially in the war-industry. They were worked till they collapsed and then they were just disposed of and replaced by one of their fellows – like ‘single-use’-workers. This is not easily written, but even less easily understood. The Nazis in the concentration camps did not only go as far as to collect and store each single shoe, handbag and pair of glasses from the killed Jews, but they also cut off the hair and removed the golden teeth from those that were gassed, before they were burned. The hair was then used to make door mats, on which the officers could wipe their dirty boots and the gold was melted into jewellery – wedding rings, necklaces and war-achievement-medals. It is this 'efficiency' that shocks me most.


Let’s pray that no nation, no people, nobody in the world will ever be as exploited as the Jews were in Nazi Germany. Let’s pray that no nation will ever be so blinded and so blindly guided to commit such terrible atrocities as the Germans were by Adolf Hitler.