Déjà vu

Digital art collage by Stella Kalaw

The faces of the few remaining survivors filled my television screen - weathered, dignified, solemn. As I watched with awe the 80th commemoration of Auschwitz-Birkenau’s liberation, I was reminded of my own childhood. I was almost three years old in 1945 and had survived the Allied bombing of Berlin.

It was only in 1957, when I was a teenager, that I first came face to face with the atrocities committed in Auschwitz. The 35-minute documentary “Nacht und Nebel” (Night and Fog), filmed in France, flickered on a big screen in my West Berlin high school auditorium and revealed harrowing footage of unspeakable monstrosities.

In line with Germany’s prevailing silencing and hiding of the unfathomable deeds committed under the Nazi regime, my dumbfounded peers and I were left on our own to deal with our emotions. We were not offered any adult comments upon our return to class. Classic German literature, taught by our likely ex-Nazi sympathizer German teacher, simply continued.

The hellishness of the Auschwitz concentration camp disclosed in that film footage pierced a dagger into my heart that has lived there forever and opened my eyes to the horrors that we humans are willing to inflict on other human beings.

Learning who had ordered, organized, and executed these atrocities crushed me with a brutal weight. The barbaric truth felt like being held underwater, struggling and gasping for air. When I finally surfaced, I emerged not hungry for life, but disoriented, numb, and profoundly disillusioned with humanity. Despair took hold and, along with grief, became my companion—sometimes centre stage, sometimes lingering in the shadows.

I didn't have religious beliefs to frame these horrors in terms of 'good' and 'evil.' Instead, I had a child's clear-eyed understanding of conscience, and through that lens, I recognized absolute darkness. I lived among the perpetrators, walking the same streets as those who had committed the unimaginable.

These revelations shattered any belief in inherent human goodness or hope for humanity's future. I carried a constant warning in my heart—what had happened could happen again. By age fifteen, I had learned lifetime lessons: stay attuned to falsehood, question everything, never accept anything at face value. This critical stance became my armour, not just against deception but against drowning in my own despair. I was determined to remain vigilant, watching for hatred's seeds—whether planted through cunning indoctrination or nurtured in the fertile soil of mass fanaticism.

Two decades later, I allowed a ray of light into this darkness when the world's power players created accountable systems for maintaining safety and peace, even welcoming the ex-enemy into the circle. The belated moves of my country to face up to the crimes of the Holocaust brought some balm to my endlessly raging heart about my people and tempered my dark views toward the human race.

Now, more than 60 years later, these tender roots of hope are shrivelling. They have not only withered—they have been blown away by human-made storms, leaving me, once again, with grief and sorrow. It feels like a high-speed train to disaster has pulled away from the station.

All around, I witness what feels like a haunting echo of the darkness I first encountered at fifteen. The march toward mean-spirited views, the unbridled power grabs, the razing of humanitarian values—all warning signs I recognize too well. I never wanted to watch the disintegration of the fairer world we had begun to build.

I grieve that return to darkness in my soul.

I grieve the loss of hope for goodness.

I grieve the absence of wisdom, the abandonment of empathy.

I grieve the willingness to overlook and to deny the suffering caused.

I grieve the human greed for vicious, small-minded and oppressive power.

I grieve the hunger for war, weapons, destruction and domination.

Most of all, I am appalled by the gullibility of ordinary people who follow demagogues into disaster—blindly, mesmerized, seduced by webs of lies.

The majority of the German nation enabled horrendous crimes by slithering into evil with full-blown enthusiasm for the cunning regime. Today, I watch in high distress as history threatens to repeat itself—as growing masses once again close their eyes to cruelty, pour zealous support onto perilous führers, and roar their approval for chilling goals. The patterns I witnessed in Germany are emerging again, and I am filled with fear for all our futures.

It is a heavy burden for me, this grief returning with a vengeance.

It is a heavy burden to mourn again at the age of 82.