The More Things Change...

You’ve probably seen or heard about the tweet from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, in which she called the prisons at the border “concentration camps.”  A lot of right-wing pundits responded with content-free yelling of the “How dare she?” genre, after which some helpful people took to Twitter to explain the difference between concentration camps and death camps.

Strangely, I’d never thought much about this difference, despite the fact that my father had been in both.  As I’ve written before, he and his parents fled Nazi Germany for Holland in 1935.  Then the Nazis invaded Holland, and in 1942 my father and his family were ordered to Westerbork.

Westerbork was a strange place, an anomaly in a lot of ways.  It started out as a transit camp, a way station to one or another of the death camps.  But the main concern of the camp commander, Albert Gemmeker, was to stash away as much money as he could before the war ended, and so he would send the prisoners out on various jobs and pocket what they earned.  My grandfather was allowed to leave the camp to work as an electrician, and, to get my father out of the camp as well, he would claim him as an assistant.  (My father knew almost nothing about electricity.)  Another job they had, which had fascinated me as a kid, was breaking into safes by blowing them up with dynamite.  My father said that the safes, which had been confiscated from other Jews, were almost always empty.

“Why didn’t you escape?” I asked when I heard this story, and he told me that his mother was still in the camp and would probably have been killed if they hadn’t come back.

Gemmeker’s superiors in Berlin disapproved of all of this, and they sent him a stream of memos ordering him to stop coddling his prisoners.  His function, they told him, was simply to send people on to Bergen-Belsen and Sobibor.  In response Gemmeker got one of the prisoners, a professional photographer, to take pictures of people at their jobs, presenting them in the kinds of Heroic Worker poses he thought his superiors would approve of.  My father’s photograph shows him shoveling coal to heat the camp.  Amazingly, he managed to get a copy, and even, more amazingly, he kept it with him throughout the war.

Conditions at the camp, never good, deteriorated as the war went on.  Too many people lived in too little space, with more coming every day.  Because of the poor food and terrible sanitation people became sick with hepatitis and other diseases, and some of them died.  Lice was common.  And, every week, a train left for one of the death camps.

So that’s what a concentration camp looked like.  To me, it’s frighteningly similar to the camps at the border — except that no one separated parents from their children at Westerbork, and the prisoners there had roofs over their head and places to sleep.  On the other hand, immigrants at the border are not being sent to death camps — but many of them are forced to go back to the countries they came from, where they’re in very real danger of being killed.

And what did a death camp look like?  It looked like Bergen-Belsen, where my father and his parents were sent after two years in Westerbork.  It’s a place that actively killed people, and passively killed them as well, by illness and starvation.  My grandfather died there, of malnutrition.

Concentration camps aren’t death camps.  No dictator starts a genocide by ordering the populace to go out and become mass murderers.  It’s too blunt, too shocking; people would rebel.  No, the dictator has to work up to it gradually, imprisoning a few people, then more, then killing some, until when they finally build the gas chambers it seems like a logical progression.

I resent it that I have to waste time by explaining all of this.  And of course this is exactly what the people who complained about Ocasio-Cortez’s tweet wanted.  They wanted us to take our eyes off the important thing, our great shame, which is that the United States is building concentration camps.  Right now I don’t think that they’ll progress (or regress) to death camps.  But then, I never thought we’d have concentration camps either.