Au Revoir to Our Humanity

Commentary On several occasions at the end of WWII army commanders who liberated German concentration camps forced local people to file through them, under guard, meet some of the prisoners, and witness for themselves the horror of it all. For most of those people, the experience must have been deeply traumatic, and it is said that some were driven to suicide by the shame and shock of reality. Our attitude to this has commonly been: “Serves them right!” When you see the record of those places on film your anger rises to choke you. It is easy to feel vengeful towards civilians who lived near the camps and didn’t know, or pretended not to know, what was really going on....