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ERETRIA,
Greece — The sites of horror — the places where mass murder happened —
are seared into my memory. Holocaust sites like the Warsaw Ghetto and
Auschwitz, or Kigali, where the Hutus butchered the Tutus, or the Falls
Road in Belfast, where many died over the decades of strife.
A new one has just been fixed firmly in my memory: Distomo.
These
sites of slaughter trigger the sense of how fragile human society is —
and such slaughter is taking place this day, this hour, this minute in
Ukraine.
I
am not enthralled by history per se. My lens is mainly confined to what
happened in my lifetime, whether as a small child during World War II
or the years since. That way, I know that it can and will happen again
and again.
The
horrors of the past aren’t confined to the past. They leak into the
present as new bleak chapters on human conduct are written.
I
say this because I have just visited Distomo, where barbarity reached a
crescendo on June 10, 1944. There, for two hours, the Waffen-SS killed
villagers with machine guns, bayonets and with any weapon at hand. They
killed the unborn, infants and older children, women and men. They
beheaded the village priest.
If they paused, it was to rape.
The
Association of European Journalists, the 60-year-old organization with
sections spread across Europe, had invited me to its annual congress in
central Greece. After two busloads of delegates had visited the Oracle
at Delphi, we stopped at Distomo: a trip from the celestial to the
bestial.
My
mind is set afire with questions at these World War II sites. If I had
been a young Jew swept up by the Nazis, would I have been killed in a
camp? If I had been a young German guard, would I have participated in
the killing, and how much enthusiasm would I have brought to the work?
I
wonder how the young men who did the butchery at Distomo lived with
themselves afterward. Did they dream of bayonetting pregnant women, of
old people begging to be killed instead of their spouses, children and
grandchildren?
In
the end, few were spared — only those who were left for dead.
Conservative estimates are that 238 people died in the massacre.
My
journalistic colleagues and I went from the foibles of the Greek gods
of antiquity to the horrors of humans in the 20th century.
I
was just a child during World War II, but I feel especially connected
because this and other Nazi atrocities happened in my lifetime.
When
I visited Auschwitz and saw the hair, the shoes, the toys and other
jetsam of children, my thought wasn’t that it could have been me, but
that those could have been my friends, my playmates, and every Jew I
have been close to, and there have been many.
At
the Distomo museum, they show a graphic film with eyewitness accounts
of those who survived, those who bore witness, like the woman who
describes scooping the brains back into her dead toddler’s head and
carrying him home — but her house, and nearly all those in the village,
was burned by the SS. That is what she did and lived to tell — to tell
of that butchered child. She said in the film that she couldn’t forgive.
Who with that memory could?
The
young men who carried out the Distomo killings, under their 26-year-old
leader, SS-Hauptsturmfurer Fritz Lautenbach, did so in reprisal for
attacks on German troops.
After
visiting many killing fields — and I don’t seek them out — I wonder
what I would have done? Would I have followed orders? Would I, in
seconds, persuade myself that what I was doing was right?
What
would I do if I were on the Russian frontlines in Ukraine today? There
is savagery equal to Distomo going on right now in wars in many places,
carried out by people just like us.
On Twitter: @llewellynking2
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of "White House Chronicle" on PBS. |