History Calling - Walking through

History Calling - Walking through the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC is, to say the least, sobering.

An elevator carries you up to the uppermost of the four floors, as a speaker plays a recording (or uncanny simulation) of an American unit's radio call on discovering a concentration camp - real or recreation, the static-y voice of the officer captures the unfolding horror the soldiers, no doubt veterans of untold horrors in battle themselves, feel on seeing the sights the visitor is about to see. Then, you work your way down. The top floor covers the pre-war years - the roots of German antisemitism, Hitler's rise to power, the Anschluss, the building of the legal and social groundwork that led to what we run into on the second floor.

The next floor - the third - covers the beginning of the war; the beginnings of the Endloesung, the Final Solution. An overwhelming grayness settles over you as you see the nightmare unfolding. While we all know how the story ends, you get the sense that it's all creeping up on you in its immense import.

The next floor - Two - is the nightmare in its full fury; the floor is dedicated to relics of the industrialization of murder. It's jarring and awful and shakes you to the very core of your soul, if you have one. My stepson - 14 at the time - had to bow out of the tour. It was too much for him.

The designers of the exhibits must have known what they were dealing with, because the final - First - floor of the museum lightens up. It's dedicated to the liberation of the camps, and the story of the Danish Resistance (which managed to smuggle the vast majority of Denmark's Jews to Sweden and safety) and a copy of Vad Yashem's list of the Righteous, the depressingly small yet hope-inspiringly long list of people who risked death to save Jews from the death machine.

Walking out of the Holocaust Museum, one whispers "no, never ever again" through teeth gritted to keep from crying, and hugs one's children a little more tightly.

Why do I bring this up?

Because it's happening. Again. And, just like the first Holocaust, you're not going to hear about it on the major media until it's far too late.

North Korea maintains a series of Gulags that put Stalin's - perhaps even Orwell's - to shame for their relative size and comprehensiveness and ruthlessness.

The horror is immense. And - worst of all - the truth is out there - somewhere. Just not in the New York Times, or the Big Three, or the BBC or CNN.

The Infinite Monkeys had an excellent digest of new, emerging information on the topic yesterday. It's very much worth a read.

The Monkeys link to a ghastly - and dead-on - article in OpinionJournal from Claudia Rosett. The article starts off noting the disappearance of one of the many refugees from North Korea, one of very few that had the "luck" to encounter Westerners after escaping to China. I add emphasis in places below:

America, erstwhile haven for the tempest-tossed, seems to have room for refugees from everyplace on earth--except North Korea. And though America serves as home to many a would-be-democratic-government in exile, there is no such North Korean presence here, no resistance movement. Nothing. Plenty of North Koreans have tried to escape the regime of Kim Jong Il. But, dear readers, have you ever met one? Or even seen one on television?

Instead, the free world looks to South Korea as the keeper of this important human trust--to offer a haven for North Koreans who value freedom. Usually, it is in such havens that exiles from tyrannies can form a base, get out the word about atrocities back home, offer insights into the vulnerabilities of tyrants and find ways to smuggle into the tyrannies some words of truth and hope.
But in today's South Korea, fat chance. This is the place where authorities have twice this past week roughed up German doctor Norbert Vollertsen, the single loudest voice trying for three years now to draw attention to the depravities of the North Korean government, the plight of the people still there, and the civilized world's utter abandonment of the refugees. There was some attention in the news last week to the efforts of Mr. Vollertsen and some of his activist colleagues to send solar-powered radios into North Korea, attached to balloons--which the South Korean authorities stopped them from doing. The prohibition and the beating of Mr. Vollertsen that accompanied it, underscore Mr. Vollertsen's message--which is not simply that conditions in North Korea rival the atrocities under Nazi Germany, and that some refugees are desperate enough to die trying to escape. It is also that the civilized world, South Korea at the forefront, simply does not want to see, hear, know, or help, and in ignoring the 22 million people of North Korea, while we parley with their jailers, we throw away our best hope of peacefully ending this nightmare.

One can not dig into this story long without getting that feeling from the second floor of the Holocaust Museum.

One can also find precious few references to the story in the major media.

On the eve of World War Two, most of the Western world buried the story of the Holocaust, until they couldn't bury it - when the troops started liberating camps. Before the war, it was an inconvenient stumbling block for diplomatic negotiation. During the war, the powers that be either doubted the story, or thought it smacked of WWI-style propagandistic overkill. In the end, they were both wrong.

The US State Department (along with the UN and the South Koreans), spooked by Kim Jong Il's blustering and the threat that the North may have nukes, wants smooth negotiations with the North. Talk of human rights is a prime target to get left off the table. It's inconvenient, when dealing with a petulant madman like Kim.

And so we get stories like those of Dr. Vollertsen (of whom more tomorrow):

Yet for all the horrors I witnessed in North Korea, here I once worked for 18 months as a medical worker for Cap Anamur, a German aid organization, I was never beaten by the police -- not even in my last days there as persona non grata, just before my expulsion for the expression of pro-human rights views.

Here, in South Korea, I have been beaten by the police -- among others.

During our balloon-launching attempt on Aug. 22, a young South Korean (well-fed, wanting for nothing) attacked me, threw me to the ground and escaped with a bundle of radios intended for his starving, destitute brothers across the border -- an assault carried out right under the noses of the riot police. Then I was attacked by the police themselves. One officer jumped on my twisted knee while I was lying on the ground. But even that was not as painful as the incident in March this year when some riot policemen kicked me in the groin while I was standing in the middle of their crowd during a protest in front of the Chinese embassy here in Seoul.

On Sunday, I was attacked by North Korean "journalists" at the World University Games in Daegu, while holding a peaceful press conference in front of the convention building there. The South Korean newspapers reported that I "exchanged punches with the North Koreans." In reality, I was standing on my crutches, still suffering from my injuries from the balloon-launch assault, and could barely stay upright. I was also wearing a neck-brace, and so was unable even to swivel my head to face my North Korean attackers.

Afterwards, the same newspapers called me an "extreme ultra-right-wing activist," even "fascist," which is ironical, given that I am doing what I am doing for the North Koreans mainly to atone for the shameful fascist history of my home country, Germany.

Attacking Kim - or Castro - today is like attacking Hitler or Stalin in 1933; despite their ghastly crimes against humanity, the lunatic left fears the beginning of a slippery slope.

The story may go away - it may never even arrive, as far as the consumer of American news is concerned. We - those who pay attention to these things, and the part of the Blogosphere concerned with actual rights for real humans - need to do our best to fix that.

I'll be writing on some variety of this topic for the rest of this week. Tomorrow (computer access willing) I'll be going over whatever I can find about the left's approach to this issue. Saturday - all caveats still apply - I'm going to try to write something about those who are the Danish Fishermen of 2003 - who, like Vollertsen, know the depth of this story and are speaking out.

Also, check out some of the other Northern Alliance blogs, as well as the Monkeys.

And stay tuned.

Posted by Mitch at August 28, 2003 09:15 AM