Black is White, Up is Down and Short is Long: Why is it so Easy to Mess up Life?
Lately I have been talking and focusing on the Holocaust of WWII, the trials and plights that the Jews endured, but they were not the only ones to suffer throughout the war. When the Nazi took prisoners of war, they treated them much like how they did the Jews, locking them in train cars, taking their cloths and placing them inside old concentration camps that once held Jews that had been killed. However, the conditions at which they were kept were on the whole much better, they got more food, rest and were treated more simply as prisoners, not insects that were there only to be killed. While in capitation many of the prisoners were forced into labor to help fuel the Nazi war machine, a lot of hard labor, but again they were still allowed to rest and eat more food, they were still subjected to conditions that were worlds above that that the Jews had to endure. Those that were captured by the Japanese endured something much worse with the brutality about equaling the Holocaust, but I will save that for a later post and focus on the Nazi.
What does imprisonment and war do to someone who is not meant to take part in it? I have recently been reading Slaughter House-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, in which his main character Billy Pilgrim is sent into WWII as a chaplain’s assistant, and is captured by the Nazis and forced to work in one of their camps until the end of the war. Billy is a very frail boy in comparison to the other soldiers he is surrounded by, and seems to break under the strain. He starts to hallucinate and believes he is traveling though time and was abducted by aliens. The whole book jumps around from time period to time period and can be very confusing, but this is just a very elaborate way to express the complexity of war and its effects on people. Throughout the portions of the book where he is being transported to the camps and is interned in them very much reflect the Holocaust and how prisoners were treated by the Nazi.
The effects that Billy felt are not really that unique to just him, he exhibits many symptoms of PTSD or Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, something that is becoming more common with soldiers returning from war. Sgt Clive Rowlands was a soldier during the Bosnian conflict in the late 1990s, he witnessed many horrible things that scarred him deep within. Unlike Billy though his illness was triggered by a car accident, after which all he could see were vivid flashbacks of past events, images that would not go away so he began to drink.
“There were mass graves and bodies everywhere. I saw a 78-year-old blow himself up with a hand grenade in front of me, and I’ve found babies, women, children mutilated.”
Seeing these types of images is very common in war veterans, and is not an easy thing to treat. Many feel lost because of this very problem, they lose hope, their marriages ends, many cannot deal with it and either die or go insane. Thankfully it is much easier now to determine if someone has been effected by this, and treatments are becoming available that can help those afflicted get back on their feet and get back to their lives.
‘Ghosts of War’ Leave Mental Trauma
by: Ruth Clegg, BBC News
by: Kurt Vonnegut
I agree with you. If you ask anyone about World War II and who were the people that were done the greatest injustice they would tell you that it was the Jewish people. This is rightfully so because so many of them were ripped from their homes and killed without a second thought but if you became a prisoner of war you received very close to the same treatment that the Jews did in the concentration camp. Prisoners of war and captured civilians often found themselves in the same camp even though they were separated. The stories that prisoners of war have to tell would most likely be very similar to that of Primo Levi or Vladek Spiegelman. Post traumatic stress disorder is also becoming a growing with soldier returning from Afghanistan or Iraq. It must be a very difficult transition to go from always being on alert and worrying about your safety and if you were going to make it through the day and then come home to a place that is relatively less violent and dangerous. I would have liked if you would have touched a little bit in your post about some small ways to help improve PTSD but I did enjoy reading your blog and completely agree with you.
Rob - November 28, 2009 at 9:33 pm |