There is one place I haven’t visited. I know I should but I can’t steel myself to do so now. It’s an act of cowardice, I suppose. Though I’ve mentioned Auschwitz more times than I can remember in this book, I will not go there. It may be synonymous with Nazi evildoing but I’m frightened that it’s beyond my capacity to assimilate. I’ve become saturated. There are so many more stories and many more cruelties and killings to recount, stories that remain to be uncovered amongst the hundreds of case files in the archives of the British and other prosecuting nations, stories that were never subjected to formal investigation let alone trial. But they are too much for me to contain at the moment, if at all. There comes a point when the reality of humanity’s aptitude for cruelty is simply crushing. Then the desire to look away is a matter of self-preservation. Forgetting supplants fury because a perpetual state of anger is untenable.
Except …
As I was writing this book I took a holiday with my family in Catalonia. One day we visited Tarragona Cathedral. I thought it would be a cool haven from the heat of the city. In one of the rooms attached to the cloisters was a museum. I went through the glass doors, attracted by the visible splendour inside. Protected by glass cases were various triptychs, beautifully colourful paintings in gold leaf and oils depicting the lives of the saints honoured within the various chapels of the cathedral: St Tecla, St Michael, St Fructuosus, many others.
From a distance the paintings sparkled. My eyes wandered over the depicted scenes, two or three to each panel. It was an idle gaze in that lazy way of noticing little but the colours and the cracks in the gold leaf and wood beneath, a cursory examination that expects only mild pleasure, nothing engaging. But then even in that unimaginative state one scene began to register: a saint hanging from a rope attached to a staff. Two men with giant scissors, like sheep shearers, standing each side of him. They were cutting the skin from his hands and arms, folding it back still in bodily shape. Two others were at the man’s feet. They were doing the same to his legs. The saint’s face was raised but without great agony. It was possessed by something beyond anguish.
By this stage I was transfixed. I looked at the other panel: a headless corpse, still kneeling, the executioner holding the head by its hair. The face of the severed head had the same expression as the man being flayed. Was one or the other St Bartholomew? I didn’t care. I felt sick. I turned away, though it took an effort, as though I was compelled to scrutinise the details.
I glanced across at another painting. A woman tied spreadeagled to an X-shaped cross, naked and covered with splashes of red, a man tearing at her body with a pair of long pincers.
And another: a man on all fours, head up, a soldier with a long curved sword held high, ready to swing at his neck.
I thought, these pictures weren’t displaying the lives of the saints: they were glorifying their excruciating deaths. And deaths which were celebrated, admired, beautified. ‘You will see that by God’s power I am stronger in being tortured than you are in torturing me,’ said St Vincent, according to The Golden Legend.
I hustled my daughters away and outside, telling them they shouldn’t look, that there were pictures they shouldn’t see.
In the cloister garden as I watched my children playing amidst the jackfruit trees and fountains and close-cropped grass, I thought those paintings made little sense.
Now, at the end of this book, as I’ve decided to look no further, I’m tempted to believe the complete opposite. If the term that’s been present throughout, those words ‘crimes against humanity’, is to have any meaning, how can I disregard what that humanity is? Looking at those terrible pictures, remembering the files and files I’d read of other atrocities, remembering the camps I’d visited where the physical residue of countless cruelties is ever present, it would be naïve, perhaps negligent, to think it didn’t include the propensity to inflict violence and harm on other people. To do so would leave the term superficial and incomplete. It would be hopelessly romantic.
But I should have known that. Reading Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others I found this passage:
Someone who is perennially surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of inflicting in the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties upon other humans, has not reached moral or psychological adulthood. No one after a certain age has the right to this kind of innocence, of superficiality, to this degree of ignorance, or amnesia.1
She’s right.
But she tempers this, recognising that ‘too much remembering’ can be embittering and thus destructive. ‘To make peace is to forget,’ she wrote. ‘To reconcile, it is necessary that memory be faulty and limited. If the goal is having some space in which to live one’s own life, then it is desirable that the account of specific injustices dissolve into a more general understanding that human beings everywhere do terrible things to one another.’
Now, thinking about all I have found and all I have chosen to write, I can see the fury set loose in retribution against those caught and put on trial after the war suffered from this contradiction. It began as a romantic gesture. And like any romance and like any gesture, the gloss of virtue soon fell away to reveal a hard, pragmatic undercoat. The enormity of the task meant the participants didn’t have the resolve to sustain it. It was beyond them as it would be beyond anyone. Perhaps, though, anger as a spur to justice is romantic too. For the most part it’s temporary. Resentment might remain but unrelenting fury is hopeless and rare and often refuels hatreds.
I wonder then, for the last time, what they achieved, Nuremberg and all those thousands of investigations and thousands of trials and thousands of hangings and thousands of prison sentences ultimately cut short, as fury passed and was replaced not by forgiveness nor by forgetting but a strange shrug of self-preservational indifference. Did they provide any justice to the victims? I think about the 7,000 people who were killed in Neustadt Bay: no one bore responsibility for that catastrophe. No one was held accountable. How many more deaths and tortures were similarly ignored, and how many perpetrators escaped, both having to be disregarded because there were simply too many to address? For all Nuremberg’s value in confronting the overarching systems of Nazi inhumanity, the victims were only numbers. That’s what law and trial invariably promises: an impersonal and imperfect reaction to human cruelty and human suffering.
Perhaps, though, I should expect no more. Perhaps I should value the small but significant resistance to maleficence marked by the retribution. It may have been symbolic, shambolic, illusory, as are all schemes of justice, and for the greater part wholly obscured, but it was essential for all that. What else could they have done? That much is worth remembering when so much has been forgotten.