"Labyrinth of Silence": We should not forget the Jews in the concentration camps, let alone the eight thousand criminals
A friend asked me, do you often read books about the Nazis about World War II, don't you find it monotonous and boring? I said to them, not at all. Because those works have different perspectives and different ways of opening memories, the touch or shock to me is also different. Even roughly the same story and value orientation doesn't affect how I feel. It seems to me that no amount of narrative can give insight into that period of history.
My concern is that people have lost enthusiasm for research on this history and have lost patience for paying attention to this memory. Because every opening will be accompanied by the shame of a nation, a country, or a family; every opening will be intertwined with the torture of the conscience and human nature of the present person. This is not alarmist. For Germany, for example, that cruel and absurd history was related to almost every German of that era.
"The Labyrinth of Silence" once again made me feel the respect for history of this nation and the spirit of repentance that makes people respect. Gurnica, a newspaper reporter, took Simon to the prosecutor's office. In the hall, Gurnica angrily complained to the silent prosecutors that his friend Simon had just seen Schultz, a former SS officer who had killed countless people in concentration camps, who had committed murder according to the law, but he had not been tried and punished as he deserved, and that he was now a teacher. He wanted to sue the executioner, but the police department refused. Radman was shocked by Gurnica's rant, not only by the appalling absurdity of reality, but also by the dismissive attitude of his superiors.
Following the prosecutor's proposal, Radman began gathering evidence. The first thing to accomplish is to confirm the current occupation and residence of the person on Simon's list. The work was complicated and trivial, but Radman was tireless and enthusiastic. With Ginica's help, they found many former SS who lived around them. The demons and executioners of Auschwitz, who are now teachers, doctors, bakers, have long since disappeared the blood on their hands. The dead Jews have been forgotten, but they are still living in the sun, dignified or self-sufficient, enjoying food and ordinary and peaceful days.
However, at this time, Radman is no longer simple, and his heart is a review of history and a re-evaluation of human nature. He cannot tolerate the impunity of those who do evil, and he cannot tolerate them living around him. What he wants to do is to take these people to court and let them accept the double trial of history and reality, human nature and law. It should be said that the kung fu paid off, and Radman finally moved the officials of the American Archival Center, who took Radman to the archives that had been in the dust for many years. In the face of the mountain of materials, Radman once again felt the cruelty and heaviness of history.
The fact that 8,000 SS soldiers "served" at Auschwitz meant that it was not one individual, but a group, who committed heinous crimes against Jews. For Radman, this is the real history, this is the truth of this nation. The crime is not only Hitler and Goebbels, these 8,000 may be ordinary officers and soldiers, who also participated in the crimes of history. Therefore, the Nuremberg trial, which only tried the main war criminals, was too perfunctory, it was only a trial in the political sense, it only divided the new pattern of post-war forces, and did not complete the real legal trial and human liquidation.
Opening this poignant memory again is many years after the end of World War II. A female columnist, because she was going to write about the Nazis, walked into Sarah's story in near-coincidence. Everyone seems to have enough reason. Selective forgetting of memory is a prerequisite for a person to continue. For the country, all memories cannot be forgotten, which is also a condition for the history of a country to remain intact.
What memory means, whether it is harmful or shameful to individuals and a people, these are no longer important, what matters is that it cannot be rewritten, much less deleted. This should be the moral common sense of a person and a nation, and it is also an important embodiment of conscience and dignity. And this should be known by our Chinese.