War and the things we bury

I've been watching "The War," the new Ken Burns documentary about World War II on PBS. It's been impossible to get through the episodes I've seen without tearing up at least a little bit. Some men recall their combat experiences, the first time in their lives they had ever been exposed to that level of violence in an up close and personal nature. Other men recall the brutal conditions they suffered through as Japanese prisoners of war, the beatings and the torture, the days, months and years of near starvation. There are women too. One was a young American girl living in the Philippines with her family when the Japanese took over and eventually made her and her family prisoners of war. Another woman was a nurse tending to wounded GIs, who on occasion could offer no more help than to hold the hand of a soldier as he slipped away to meet his maker.

Death and deprivation are pervasive in "The War," both on the battlefield and on the homefront. Burns focused on four small American towns from Watertown, CT to Sacramento, CA and we see how difficult it could be for parents and wives and friends to wait, wait and dread the arrival of a telegram from the government saying their loved one had died. There would be no reunion for them, not back on the farm in Minnesota, not on the front stoop of a house in Mobile, Alabama. A lot of men, more than many probably expected, just weren't coming home again.

What strikes me is how those who survived and returned, and the people they returned to, dealt with the war once it was over. Some admittedly held on to some anger, such as the anger one man kept inside regarding his Japanese captors. But even he, and so many others, seemingly picked up where they left off and went on to lead a normal existence, almost as if this thing that had taken over 100,000 American lives and killed millions world-wide, had never happened.

How does one go back to the farm or the office or the gas station or the bank or wherever with the memories one must have had? Did one think about seeing his best friend shot to pieces in a battle? Or does one repress it as much as possible in order to live life again and try to pursue happiness?

The "good guys" certainly must have repressed a lot and that repression probably took a lot out of them. But just what did it take for the "bad guys" to bury inside them the knowledge of what they were doing, terrorizing humanity and exterminating humans in so many inhuman ways?

Recently, I came across an article in the New York Times about an online display of newly found photographs from Auschwitz, presented by the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC. They are not the photos we have grown familiar with, of dead, emaciated bodies stacked like cordwood, or families huddled together in a grossly overcrowded train car. No, these photos are of Nazis on their break time, their cigarette time, their leisure time. Genocide can be so exhausting, what with the crematoriums breaking down and all, they just get used so much you know, a Nazi really does need to stop and smell the roses once in a while.

In one photo, a member of the SS lights a Christmas tree, in another photo, a group of SS sing, in another, women are eating bowls of blueberries. What kind of delusional thoughts allowed them to go on like that, to go on with a normal existence while they send Jews and the other "undesirables" of Europe to the gas chambers? How deep did they repress the feelings they must once have had, of charity and kindness towards their fellow man? Or did they never have those feelings to begin with?