Word: belsen
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Early in his career, Peake became a documentary war artist during World War II. This experience appears to have pushed his world view and his art into a considerably darker realm. In June 1945, he was among the first British civilians to visit the liberated concentration camp at Belsen, Germany. Most of the former prisoners he saw there were too sick to be evacuated. The stark poems and drawings he made about these victims literally dying before his eyes are nearly too harrowing to bear. Returning to Britain, he finished the first Gormenghast book in 1946 and spent the next...
...Bergen-Belsen was one of some 100 camps created to effect Hitler's Final Solution, the extermination of the Jewish people. The terrible roster of major concentration camps includes Auschwitz in Poland, where 4 million people were murdered; Treblinka, also in Poland, which had the capacity to kill 25,000 people a day; Buchenwald, near Weimar in eastern Germany. The assembly-line exterminations of the Jews began by the summer of 1942; by the end of the war in May of 1945, 6 million Jews had died, nearly two-thirds of the entire European Jewish population. At least 4.5 million...
...much of Bergen-Belsen remains today. A 25-meter-high gray stone obelisk marks the site, rising above it like a baleful warning. Inscribed on its side is a singular commandment: EARTH CONCEAL NOT THE BLOOD SHED ON THEE! Fourteen long, low mounds of mass graves are marked simply, starkly: HERE LIE BURIED 1,000 BODIES; HERE LIE 2,500 BODIES. In 1975, then Israeli Premier Yitzhak Rabin walked among the neatly tended graves of Bergen-Belsen and remarked bitterly, "It is so green that it is making me angry...
...Piccadilly and the Champs Elysées and Stalingrad. Second, because it was both a war and a crime--6 million Jews and perhaps 4.5 million others exterminated. What Reagan may not understand is that cemeteries house visible ghosts. At Bitburg, the SS troops still rant and hunt. At Bergen-Belsen the children still weep...
...perhaps just as difficult to find redemption at Bergen-Belsen, but there is a difference. There the blood of Abel cries out from the ground. We cannot answer that cry, but listening for it is in itself a redemptive act. To imagine that one can do the same over the tomb of Cain is sad illusion. --By Charles Krauthammer