Read And Be Afraid (Malayalam)

IN AUSCHWITZ the exposed-brick barracks sit in neat rows, in a calm so deep it must necessarily rise out of death. The tidy paths cut each other at right angles, and the trees are stately and still. The sweet boxy buildings could be town houses, or school blocks, or military quarters. Or killing factories that smoothly sucked in human beings, separated them from their clothes, their hair, their gold teeth, their reading glasses and their children, and then processed them in a furnace. The electrified barbed wire fences that run in straight lines held up by concrete pillars could have kept out unwanted intruders, or kept in helpless innocents.(Reference Tehelka )

The Nazis believed in the differences in men, and believed in the extermination of these differences. The imagination can never fully get around the horror of Auschwitz — and adjoining Birkenau — where in less than three years the Nazis gassed and incinerated nearly one-and-a-half million men, women and children, many no more than a few years old. In a world full of memorials to our creativity and genius, this is a memorial to the darkness that ever lurks in the heart of men.

As you walk through those surreally peaceful double-storey blocks, you will invariably find yourself tailed or led by a crocodile of teenagers — scrubbed shining, brightly attired, speaking in hushed voices — winding their way through a byway of history to which they — and each one of us — are deeply connected. Round the year, ceaselessly, the Jews ship out their children from all over the world to show them the beast that resides in us all. By their own long suffering they understand that the battle of life against death is the battle of memory against forgetting. That to not look the beast in the face is to have the beast on your back all the time.

There is nowhere in India that you can take your daughter if you wish to level her with the beast of Partition, the beast of the 1984 Sikh riots, the beast of a hundred communal and caste massacres, or the beast of Gujarat 2002. Because we do not remember, we repeat; because we do not look the evil in the eye, it dogs us all the time.