Today I saw the paintings of Felix Nussbaum who because he was born Jewish was murdered at Auschwitz in 1944. My friend described how ‘we Germans’ had done ‘the worst thing’ by industrializing mass murder. I had never thought of it this way. Apparently Himmler watched a group of detained Jews digging their own mass grave and then vomited each time one was shot and tipped into it. His response was, we need to find a cleaner way of doing this; so the gas chamber was devised. (Why not, “we need to stop doing this”?) Standing in front of Nussbaum’s sensitive portraits and seeing from the dates he had less than five, four, three years to live it was impossible not to weep. We wept and choked and kept our tears silent. The museum gave onto neat German houses through a series of crooked windows, it is called the Museum with No Exit.
Afterwards it took a very long time to come to grips with my anger and fear and sense of terror and loss, with the grief, the resentment and yes, incipient hatred. I resented all of us for being here when so many sensitive and feeling people have died. I resented my own country, built on the backs of its own native populations and still dishonest about the murders in police custody and in jails. I could feel in my responses how easy it is to start blaming people and how delicate and difficult is the work of keeping one’s heart free of the pernicious weeds of resentment, envy, fear, and suspicion. How easy it feels to start to build on the seemingly empowering intoxication of self-righteousness. They, they, they. We, we, we. All the way home. Alright.
