Monuments to a deadly predator
Never forget?
Humans are the deadliest animals on Earth, the “apex predator.” We don’t just kill other creatures to eat, we kill them for trophies. And we kill each other with abandon. And fun.
And yet, we regret. We lament. And we want to remember. “Never again!”So we build monuments.
“Iron heart”
It is claimed that the most purely evil Nazi was Reinhard Heydrich. Hitler called him “the man with the iron heart” at his funeral. Under Heinrich Himmler, Heydrich organized major police organizations and chaired the Wannsee Conference, which decided on the “Final Solution” to “the Jewish problem.” He also launched the armed units (Einsatzgruppen) which sought and massacred Jews in the occupied East, the “Holocaust with bullets.” This earned him the nickname of HHhH, for “Himmlers Hirn heißt Heydrich” [Himmler’s brain is named Heydrich].
Sent to oversee Bohemia and Moravia (essentially the modern Czech Republic), Heydrich became known as “the butcher of Prague.” The resistance ambushed him in Prague on May 27, 1942, with British help. He died in great pain six days later.
The Nazis decided to massacre two little villages, Lidice and Ležáky, in reprisal. All the inhabitants were murdered, including 81 children from Lidice and 11 from Ležáky. 11 other children were considered suitable for “Germanizing” and survived as adoptees of German families.
The first monument above depicts the murdered children of Lidice.
“Lost property”
The second monument is on the island of Martinique. The last slaveship arriving shortly after the trade was abolished was lost in an 1830 tempest that dashed it against the rocky western coast. Most on board perished. Their names and that of the ship are unknown for the most part, though some white members of the crew were buried nearby. The slaves were just “lost property.”
In 1998, to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the abolition of slavery on the island, the Martiniquais sculptor Laurent Valère created this striking memorial to the lost slaves of the shipwreck, and more generally, all the slaves dragged to the island to work sugarcane. Each of the fifteen statues is 2.5 meters high and weighs 4 tons. Unlike the wistful faces of the Lidice children, these are downcast. They face Africa, from whence they were dragooned, only to die in sight of land.
“The Nazis did it! The Nazis did it!”
In 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union attacked Poland together, which signaled the beginning of World War II. Less than two years later, Hitler decided to forget his alliance with Stalin so as to gain more room for his Reich. Operation Barberossa began in June 1941, and the two former allies became deadly enemies. In 1943 German forces uncovered thousands of Polish officers in mass graves near Smolensk in the Katyn forest, the Soviets claimed that the Nazis did it. It became a focal point of Nazi propaganda, which for once told the truth: the Soviets murdered some 15,000 Polish soldiers in 1940. Fifty years later, the Soviet Union finally admitted that its secret police was responsible.
Furthermore, some 1.2 million Poles were deported to the Soviet Union.
Our third monument in Warsaw to the victims of the Katyn massacre and the deportees depicts a train wagon loaded with religious symbols, Muslim, Jewish, and Orthodox and Catholic Christians. The wagon itself recalls the numerous trains that hauled Poles to Siberia and elsewhere in the Soviet Union, as well as those that brought captured Polish soldiers to their mass graves.
There is a bitter Polish joke. “When the Germans and the Russians attack, who do we shoot at first?” “The Germans, of course—business before pleasure.”
200,000…
All in all, the Nazi regime murdered some 200,000 Roma (colloquially, “gypsies”) during World War II. The only monument in France is this apparently cheerful couple, a father and his daughter. On June 26, 1944, soldiers of the SS Das Reich division added to their long list of crimes against humanity. Coming upon 2 caravans of Roma, they dragged the people out and shot them, eight men and women, and six children, age 14 to 2 months: fourteen in all.
Along with Jews, Communists, and gay people, the Roma were on Hitler’s list for extermination. The Vichy regime interned some 6,000 in camps around France.
The sculptor, Serge Carvalho, used stainless steel, “because it is eternal.” He imagined the girl and her father together, facing the guns with courage and dignity.
And love.
No more!
When you look at these eloquent works of art, you want to shout “No more!” And yet, there will be. For as long as we humans decide that debasing others to mark off our own supposed superiority is right and good, it will always be easier for us deadly predators to continue to kill each other.
As long as we continue to raise such monuments, however, there will always be a glimmer of hope that we will stop, that we will finally beat our swords into plowshares, and learn war no more.
