I grew up in the shadow of the Holocaust. No grandparents. No aunts and uncles around. In their place – big black holes. While my parents tried to shield me from the details of the horrors they experienced in Poland during the 1930s and ’40s, they couldn’t protect me from them. No one goes through something like that and leaves it behind. Misery, sorrow and pain are such clever hitchhikers.

Growing up in New York City during the ’50s and ’60s, my childhood outside my home was exciting, interesting, stimulating. But inside those four walls, I felt like I was living within a box – one that contained a giant jigsaw puzzle. Many of the pieces were not exactly missing; some were faded, or frayed, and hard to discern; others were locked away – on purpose. My mother Roza (her American name) had a great capacity for joy, but she could also quickly slip into a state of melancholy. My father Jack (also his American name) was remote, quiet, off at work all the time, and had little patience for the precocious, artistic, curious child I was. I had an older brother, Joseph, who found his own coping mechanism for our dysfunctional family. He was never home. We were four people living under the same roof. But we really weren’t a family. Our home was full of secrets. Full of walls. Full of feelings that were alternately repressed – or suddenly, explosively – released.

For most of my life, my parents’ story remained shrouded in mystery. It was something they just couldn’t bring themselves to talk about. At the age of nine, I was shocked to learn my father was Catholic. And yet, my mother was Jewish, and all the cousins we knew – all Holocaust survivors – were also Jewish. So not only was our refugee family different from most Americans, we were different from all our relatives. How did that happen? No explanations. Shhhhhh! Don’t ask questions. My mother and father were unknowable. So… if I couldn’t know my parents, how could I ever hope to truly know myself?

In 1963, when I was 12 years old, I got a glimpse into the mystery of my identity. After much talk and planning, my mother and I boarded an El Al jet and flew to Israel – to spend a summer with her surviving brother and sister, who’d emigrated to the Promised Land after surviving the ravages of Nazi-occupied Poland. We split our time between visits with her brother Jacob, who delivered baked goods in Tel Aviv, and her sister Clara, who ran a small farm with her husband Herman in Nahariya.

Two things struck me immediately about Israel: It felt like a frontier, a work in progress, lacking some of the conveniences we took for granted in America; and yet, everyone seemed happy. Really happy. Passionate. Excited. Hopeful. I never witnessed emotions like that before. But the most incredible aspect of this experience was that at last, after feeling like an olive in a dish of cherries my whole life, I suddenly felt a sense of belonging. Not just with my aunt and uncle and their families – with whom I experienced an immediate bond of love – but with the whole country. Everywhere I went, I felt like I was with family. A taxi driver wasn’t just someone hired to take us from point A to point B. For a brief moment in time, he was a part of our journey. He wanted to know all about us. And he wanted to share things about himself as well. My big black holes of the Holocaust were now being bombarded with millions of sparks of light.

Until we left.

The first night away, I began to cry, and couldn’t help myself. When my mother asked me why I was suddenly so sad, I told her how much I missed my family in Israel. But my tears weren’t only for them. My mother had told me there were two other siblings – her older brothers Salo and Muno – resistance fighters murdered by the Nazis. I had never emotionally connected to them. They were just names. But now, having spent time with my mother’s surviving brother and sister, I suddenly felt the full weight of the loss of the two other brothers. My brave, beautiful uncles. How can you miss something you never had? You can’t. But somehow, I did. I missed Salo and Muno. I felt them. I loved them. I would never stop cherishing them.

The echoes of my summer in Israel never subsided. The door that had opened prompted me to become a person who would open as many doors as possible. I was fearless. I was determined to explore the world. To dig into the past. To uncover the motivations of people who shaped history. To just know things. I carved out a satisfying career as a journalist, an occasional university instructor and a documentary filmmaker (returning to Israel to make King David, and King Herod’s Lost City) – sharing my passions, telling other people’s stories.

Then in 1999, my life took an irrevocable turn. After the 1993 release of Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, based on Thomas Keneally’s 1982 book (originally entitled Schindler’s Ark), Hearst Entertainment hired me to write, produce and direct an A&E Biography of Oskar Schindler, the Nazi who saved over 1,200 Jews from certain death at the hands of his fellow Nazis. Was this by coincidence? Nothing happens by coincidence. This was my gateway to the dark days of the Holocaust. In the process of making this film, I interviewed survivors, Thomas Keneally, world-renowned Holocaust historian Dr. Michael Berenbaum, did all the necessary research and legwork, and looked at all the horrific film footage. When I told my mother about this project, she showed no surprise at all. “Oh, Oskar Schindler?

Yes, I knew all about him. You remember my friend Sally Huppert? She was one of the people he saved.” I considered the irony that one of the greatest stories of the 20th century had been right under my nose for all those years.

“MOM,” I said, “what other stories haven’t you told me about? Isn’t it finally time for you and dad to tell me what happened back in Poland?” My mother took some time to consider what I had said, and the fact that I had been adequately inoculated by all my work on the Schindler documentary. One morning, she phoned me and said, “Okay, I’ve thought about it. I’m appointing you family historian.” We had had a historian in our family. The late Dr. Philip Friedman, widely considered the father of Holocaust history, was our cousin. Could I walk in his giant footsteps?

At long last my mother felt I was ready to face the demons and ghosts she and my father had tried to tamp down in that jigsaw box for a lifetime. They too had to face them. It was difficult for both of them to delve into their tragic past, but they did it, and they did it for me. Often with tears. Often with self-imposed interruptions, when the burden of memory threatened to crush them.

I spent a year interviewing my parents and doing background research. The story was revealed gradually. Like some sacred, mystical text, it required study, meditation and a pilgrimage. I felt compelled to make a trip to Poland, a place I’d never wanted to visit. I needed to experience total immersion in this process. But by this time, my mother was too frail to make the trip. Still, there was no turning back. I packed a video camera and embarked on a journey to spend nearly a month on the road with a stranger – a man I hardly knew – my father. I had to learn the true story of my parents’ survival and unravel the personas of the two people whom I’d sought to know and understand my whole life.

In Poland, as I walked on ground that held the blood and ashes of millions of murdered souls, I pointed my camera at my father and all the places he wanted to show me. I found out that over half a century ago, my father Olek (his Polish name), a brash Polish Catholic boy of 19, had met my mother Ziuta (as she was known back then), a terrified Jewish girl of 20, when she was on the run after she’d survived two Nazi massacres of 6,500 Jews in her village, some 400 kilometers away from his. The Nazis had murdered her two older brothers, Salo and Muno, shortly after they’d gotten my mother out of the Jewish ghetto.

One day, she walked into the tavern that my father and his father Antoni ran, asking for a job. She was hired on the spot. Olek took an immediate liking to her. A few months later, in a private moment, he confessed to Ziuta the feelings that had grown and overwhelmed him. He told her he’d fallen in love with her.

She was shocked. “Well, I have a shock for you,” she replied. “I’m Jewish.” My father considered the full weight of what she’d said. And then, as only a 19-year-old with stars in his eyes and love in his heart could respond, he said: “You’re Jewish? That’s great! Now I can prove my love for you. I can lay my life on the line.” And he did just that. For two and a half years, they were on the run, with the Nazis at their heels. With bravado, with cunning, he protected her every step of that perilous journey. Or did his love for my mother create an ever-expanding state of grace? One that produced miracle after miracle. In any case, this is why I’m here today. My brother Joseph, too, who was born during that time.

In the course of my research, interviews and journey to Poland, I finally got to know and truly appreciate the wonderful, albeit strange people who’d raised me and made me who I am. When I returned to the United States, I sent a detailed account of this story, along with supporting documentary evidence, to Yad Vashem in Israel. About a year and a half later, they came to a decision. On Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Memorial Day, 2003, in a packed ceremony at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles – before the mayor, and diplomats from Poland and Israel – Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the center, bestowed my father with Israel’s highest honor, the Righteous Among the Nations award – the very same medal of heroism Oskar Schindler had received. The story had come full circle.

My mother passed away on the night of January 16, 2009, at the age of 87. My father and I were at her bedside, holding her hands, telling her how much she was loved. She’d led a full and incredible life. I know I was blessed to have her as a mother. But twice blessed to have had the opportunity to discover the truth and meaning of the life she and my father had led before I came into this world. They were together for 67 years.

As for my father and I – we are no longer strangers. I won’t sugarcoat this – we can still get under each other’s skin. But I see him with greater clarity now. I have more compassion for the man. Love doesn’t even begin to describe my feelings for him.

The ghosts and demons my parents tried to keep from me for nearly a lifetime are still there. But they’re no longer a gnawing mystery. I’ve shared a vodka with them. I’ve looked into their eyes. They no longer have power over me. As difficult as my experiences were, I have no regrets about the doors I chose to open and enter. I hope our family story inspires others to open some new doors – to look inside, to fathom the mysteries of the heart, family, and discover stories never known. I hope it inspires tolerance of those who pray to a different deity, look different or look at the world differently. And lastly, I hope it inspires unconditional love – not just romantic love, but the love of fellow human beings. We needed that so much back then. We certainly need it now.

READ ORIGINAL POST ON JPOST.COM

(Excerpt from “Years Later We Would Remember,” a forthcoming memoir about going to Poland and discovering the horrors of the past)

Warsaw, June 2, 2001 — When I awaken on my first full day in Poland, I look out the window and take in a gloomy, grey, rainy day. Ordinarily, this kind of weather depresses me. But here, now, it seems to fit the moment perfectly. Grey on grey, I can just blend in.

My father, Jack Kent (AKA Olek Glazewski), and I get ourselves ready and head down to a large, elegantly appointed, old world-style dining hall, where I find myself salivating over an expansive and sumptuous breakfast buffet. Like everyone else, we proceed to gorge ourselves on a cornucopia of delicious hams, bolognas, salamis, cheeses, smoked fish, fruit, pickled vegetables, rolls, breads and desserts – all part of the full European breakfast that is included with our room. But unlike everyone else, I consider the story I have come here to uncover, and afterwards feel tremendous guilt over my descent into gluttony. I think of those poor souls over half a century ago, who would have done anything for just one mouthful of what we had here. I walk out feeling pangs of shame and survivor guilt, what many survivors said they felt, knowing their family and friends didn’t make it out of hell alive.

My father and I have one more day here, before catching a flight to the next city on our itinerary. We head out to the only synagogue in Warsaw that survived the war, the century-old, restored Nozyk Synagogue, at number 6 Twarda Street. I’m eager to see it, as is my father.

Ordinarily, I am not a synagogue-goer. When I was 13 years old, after three years of religious studies in Hebrew school, I had my bar mitzvah — which, as an adult, I came to realize meant little more to me than participating in a social convention; I did not experience a religious awakening or feel I was taking part in a true rite of passage — entry into the “tribe,” as a full-fledged Jew. Instead, I absorbed it as a graduation, and I was done. Afterwards, for most of my life, I rarely went inside a synagogue. Until I had sons. Then, I sent them to Hebrew school and gave them bar mitzvahs, hoping they would somehow feel more at home in a synagogue than I did. It wasn’t out of any sense of religiosity; it was because of the Holocaust: six million of my people had been murdered. I wanted to make sure I put two more Jews into the world.

Despite my ambivalence toward synagogues, now, here, I am absolutely eager to enter the Nozyk synagogue. Like my parents, this synagogue is also a survivor. As with the Royal Castle, I see it as another victory over Hitler. I’m beginning to feel like I’m fighting the war all over, and yet, for the first time.

After talking to the office administration and explaining the purpose of my visit, they are happy to oblige us, allowing my father and me entry into the sanctuary. They hand us yarmulkes, the traditional Jewish skullcaps. For a second, I don’t comprehend, because religious services aren’t being conducted. But then it hits me: this a holy place. It doesn’t matter if I’m shooting video or praying — I, as a Jew, certainly have to acknowledge the sanctity of where I am.

Like every Jew and everything Jewish, the Nozyk synagogue suffered withering wave upon wave of humiliation during the war. It endured some damage during an air raid, but it was still standing afterwards. The Nazis didn’t attempt to dynamite what was left. They found it much more useful to utilize it as a stable and barn for their horses. The desecration of this sacred place, and all synagogues, was a valuable tool for the Nazis to not only viscerally demonstrate their hatred of Jews, but to demoralize them.
Inside the sanctuary, as I shoot footage of the ark, where the torah is held, and the colorful, stain-glassed windows, the ornate balcony railings, the exquisitely-carved pews, and the renaissance arches and columns, my father and I do not speak a word. We are simply in awe. This is quite unlike the lack of connection or feeling I had in synagogues in the past. I definitely feel something here. It is a quiet, understated sense of glory. Of peace. And hope. A powerful emotion comes over me: I stop rolling tape, and — almost in a whisper, with my right hand forming a canopy over my closed eyes — I chant the most fundamental Jewish prayer of all: “Shema Yisrael, Adonai Elohaynu, Adonai Echad.” Hear oh Israel! The Lord is God. The Lord is One.

“That’s beautiful, Martin,” murmurs my father, who puts his arm around my shoulder. I cannot speak.

This synagogue is alive. Jews still come here to tap into that — to pray every Friday night, at the start of the Jewish Sabbath. There are perhaps a few hundred Jews in all of Warsaw, a few thousand in all of Poland. No one knows for sure. I think these people are either very brave and strong — or very foolish. I can’t decide.

Our next stop is the Jewish Historical Institute, a 5-minute taxi ride away, where we will look at exhibitions chronicling the lives and contributions of the millions of Jews who once comprised ten percent of Poland’s population. My father and I pack up the gear, return the Yarmulkes, and I make a promise to myself that I will send a donation to the synagogue after I return to Los Angeles. At the institute, we look at displays holding photos, passports, maps, newspapers, historical documents, memorabilia, and artwork and Judaica, such as torahs and prayer shawls – giving us a tantalizing glimpse into a culture that once thrived, and was ultimately destroyed. I find it interesting, illuminating and very sad.

In 1939, there were 3.3 million Jews in Poland, 375,000 in Warsaw alone. The story of the origin of these huge numbers began some 900 years earlier, when there was a mass migration of Jews here; many were escaping persecution in Western Europe. They came from Lithuania in the north, Germany in the West, and Crimea, in the southeast. It had only recently taken on Catholicism as its primary religion. Poland had comparably less influence of religion in its politics and social structure, so Jews found a safe haven here. In 1264, King Boleslaus of Poland granted the Kalisz Statute, a charter of Jewish liberties, with dozens of statutes that guaranteed the safety and personal liberties, including freedom of religion, to all Jews in Poland. Three subsequent Polish Kings ratified this. But Jews had been mistreated since the time of the Roman Empire — why were the Polish royals so nice to them?

Forget what the history books say. I believe I know why this happened: Every Jewish kid comes from a Jewish mother. That mother – because it’s in her DNA! – makes damn sure her sons will grow up to be educated – and eventually will become a doctor, a lawyer, a scientist, an academic or a businessman. (The rebels become artisans, poets and musicians.) So, if you were a king ruling over a relatively young, up-and-coming nation-state emerging from feudalism, which Poland was at the time, you would want an educated, motivated class of citizens who could help your country grow. Hence, the Jews. (In the last 100 years, over 20% of the Nobel Prize winners have been Jewish, and yet Jews comprise a mere 1/24 of a percent of the world’s population. Why? Jewish mothers.)

But while Jewish mothers held up their end of the bargain in all respects, and the Jewish population multiplied greatly in Poland, the welcome wagon didn’t last for long. Anti-Semitism sprang up from the murky waters of superstition. The plague, called the Black Death, was seen by some as a metaphysical, wrath of God-type phenomenon. With the church fanning the flames, the Jews – those wicked killers of Christ — were easy targets, and they were blamed. There were anti-Jewish riots in 1348-49 and again in 1407 and 1494; Jews were expelled from the city of Krakow in 1495. Historians estimate some 10,000 Jews were massacred in the process. When the plague subsided, this raging climate of fear and revenge eventually burned itself out. Though intermittent and virulent waves of anti-Semitism continued through the centuries, the Jewish population nonetheless continued to thrive in Poland; by 1939 it held the largest number of Jews in Europe.

Adolf Hitler perceived this as a problem – “The Jewish Problem,” requiring a solution. With the lethal might of Germany at his disposal, he implemented a comprehensive plan aimed at eradicating the world of all its Jews. He called it “The Final Solution.” The world now calls it the Holocaust. In Poland, Germany, Hungary, Lithuania and other countries with Jewish populations, Hitler commanded his minions to cruelly uproot Jews from their homes and herd them into over-crowded ghettos, where thousands died of typhus, starvation and street executions; in towns out in the countryside, Nazi killing squads, called Einsatzgruppen, perpetrated massacres on thousands at a time; and finally with the industrialization of death, Jews were transported by train in cattle and box cars into concentration camps, where millions were gassed, and then cremated. The ashes, sold as fertilizer, helped pay for the enterprise. In 1945, at war’s end, six million had perished, and all that was left of Poland’s 3.3 million Jews was the point three. Most of the survivors soon departed – to other parts of Europe, to Palestine (now Israel), to North America, to South America. Those who wanted to get as far away as possible from the horrors of the Holocaust went to Australia.

While most survivors were trying to forget the past and rebuild their lives, a Polish history professor named Dr. Philip Friedman, a survivor himself, was determined that nothing would be forgotten. Even before the war was officially over, in cities where the Nazis had already abandoned, he sprang into action, gathering documentation of how the Jews had suffered and perished during the Holocaust. He was the first cousin of my mother’s mother, and I recall meeting him on several occasions as a child. Out of respect, we always called him Dr. Friedman. I remember him as a very serious man, someone who seemed to hold the weight of the world on his shoulders. But since no one was talking about the Holocaust to me, I had no idea at the time about the important work in which he was engaged.

Historians devoted to chronicling the Holocaust widely acknowledge Philip Friedman as the father of Holocaust history. Before the war, based in Lvov, (which was then part of Poland, but today is part of the Ukraine) he had already become well established as a historian of Polish Jewry. After the war, Friedman was the first to organize the collecting of records about Jewish life and death under German wartime occupation. He wrote the first book about Auschwitz, the infamous death camp. Friedman founded the first Jewish historical committee in Lublin, which eventually became the Jewish Historical Institute in Poland, relocated to Warsaw, (the second stop on our itinerary today.) Its primary mission was to create a record of the horrific events of the Holocaust through research, documentation, collection of evidence, and publications. Friedman was tireless in his efforts: he urged survivors in Poland to write memoirs and to gather letters, photographs, relics and any other documentary evidence that would serve future historians. He traveled to displaced persons camps in Germany, where he encouraged survivors to form historical societies, and provided instructions for the assembling and publishing of the details of the terrible events they had endured. He went to France, where he helped establish a French archive for the study of the Holocaust.

In 1948 he immigrated to New York City, where he continued to aid historical societies. My mother told me that it was Dr. Friedman who urged her to go to Manhattan one day in 1953, and visit the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, where she told the story of her family’s Holocaust experiences, while the memories were still fresh. The subsequent transcript of her interview, conducted in and written in Yiddish, is the document that I waited to unlock for my entire life. A year before this journey began, my mother finally had the transcript translated and gave it to me. I marvel now at the vision of Dr. Friedman and others engaged in the same work; they knew how vital it was to record these testimonies – chronicles of the truth about this dark chapter of history.

He lived on the upper west side of Manhattan and taught history at Columbia University. During his time in New York, he wrote and published two seminal works. Martyrs and Fighters, about the Warsaw Uprising, and Their Brother’s Keepers, about non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews. But he drove himself too hard and neglected his health; his life’s work was unfortunately cut short. Dr. Philip Friedman died in 1960 at the much too young age of 59, leaving behind a considerable quantity of material still in progress. In 1980, his widow, Ada Junia Friedman, completed her editing of his essays, and published Roads to Extinction, considered indispensable by scholars of the Holocaust. I own a copy of all three volumes, gifted to me and inscribed by Junia, who has since died. I cherish these books.

And now I feel compelled to proceed as best as can, in Dr. Friedman’s giant footsteps, documenting the history of my family, following that phone call I received years ago from my mother, when she appointed me “family historian.” How am I doing, Mom? I wish you were here. I started off my first full day in Poland as a glutton, eating 57 varieties of pig meat. But I ended up in a synagogue, paying my respects with my camera, saying a prayer. This journey is supposed to lead me to my true self. So who am I? Right now, all I know is that I’m a man who will fly out tomorrow, together with my father, to the Ukraine, to the city of Lviv. We will look for the village where you grew up, and the little town where destiny forced you down a hall, to decide if you would open and walk through an extraordinary door.

Please Note: This article first appeared on Wired.com Jan. 20, 2007.

1942: A malignant but unfocused policy of persecution turns into one of outright mass extermination at the Wannsee Conference. In a meeting lasting a little over six hours at a villa in the fashionable Berlin suburb of Wannsee, Nazi bureaucrats agree on a plan to implement the “final solution to the Jewish question.”

No formal plan for dealing with the Jews existed prior to the Wannsee Conference, and many Nazis favored the deportation or forced emigration of those they considered racial enemies. But with Germany’s conquest of Poland and western Russia, the Nazis found themselves with 11 million Jews to deal with. Deportation, they decided, was no longer practical.

There had already been mass killings of Jews, with mobile killing units — the Einsatzgruppen — shooting most of the victims. Shooting was deemed inefficient, however, because the number of people killed was relatively small while the men who did the shooting often suffered from depression or shattered nerves.

After the Wannsee Conference the method of killing was refined and expanded with assembly-line precision as the Nazis began employing both engine exhaust and Zyklon B, a commercial pesticide, to gas the Jews in their thousands. It was mass murder on an unprecedented scale, carried out in camps such as Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibor.

These camps, run by the SS under Heinrich Himmler, employed the most efficient technology available for accomplishing their task. Camps were situated near key railheads to facilitate the transportation of large numbers of people.

At the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex in southern Poland, gas chambers capable of processing up to 5,000 people per hour were built. After gassing, which could take as long as 15 minutes to complete, gold fillings were extracted from victims’ teeth, their body cavities searched for hidden valuables and the corpses incinerated in ovens.

Between 5 and 6 million Jews are estimated to have died in what is now known as the Holocaust. Another 1 million people — including German opponents of the Nazi regime — were killed as well.

Source: Various

Photo: The villa where the Wannsee Conference was held is now a memorial and museum.
Courtesy Adam Carr

Read More http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2010/01/0120final-solution/#ixzz0dCVK1xPe

Avatar half-tells a story we would all prefer to forget

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 11th January 2010

Avatar, James Cameron’s blockbusting 3-D film, is both profoundly silly and profound. It’s profound because, like most films about aliens, it is a metaphor for contact between different human cultures. But in this case the metaphor is conscious and precise: this is the story of European engagement with the native peoples of the Americas. It’s profoundly silly because engineering a happy ending demands a plot so stupid and predictable that it rips the heart out of the film. The fate of the native Americans is much closer to the story told in another new film, The Road, in which a remnant population flees in terror as it is hunted to extinction.

But this is a story no one wants to hear, because of the challenge it presents to the way we choose to see ourselves. Europe was massively enriched by the genocides in the Americas; the American nations were founded on them. This is a history we cannot accept.

In his book American Holocaust, the US scholar David Stannard documents the greatest acts of genocide the world has ever experienced(1). In 1492, some 100m native peoples lived in the Americas. By the end of the 19th Century almost all of them had been exterminated. Many died as a result of disease. But the mass extinction was also engineered.

When the Spanish arrived in the Americas, they described a world which could scarcely have been more different from their own. Europe was ravaged by war, oppression, slavery, fanaticism, disease and starvation. The populations they encountered were healthy, well-nourished and mostly (with exceptions like the Aztecs and Incas) peacable, democratic and egalitarian. Throughout the Americas the earliest explorers, including Columbus, remarked on the natives’ extraordinary hospitality. The conquistadores marvelled at the amazing roads, canals, buildings and art they found, which in some cases outstripped anything they had seen at home. None of this stopped them from destroying everything and everyone they encountered.

The butchery began with Columbus. He slaughtered the native people of Hispaniola (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic) by unimaginably brutal means. His soldiers tore babies from their mothers and dashed their heads against rocks. They fed their dogs on living children. On one occasion they hung 13 Indians in honour of Christ and the 12 disciples, on a gibbet just low enough for their toes to touch the ground, then disembowelled them and burnt them alive. Columbus ordered all the native people to deliver a certain amount of gold every three months; anyone who failed had his hands cut off. By 1535 the native population of Hispaniola had fallen from 8m to zero: partly as a result of disease, partly as a result of murder, overwork and starvation.

The conquistadores spread this civilising mission across central and south America. When they failed to reveal where their mythical treasures were hidden, the indigenous people were flogged, hanged, drowned, dismembered, ripped apart by dogs, buried alive or burnt. The soldiers cut off women’s breasts, sent people back to their villages with their severed hands and noses hung round their necks and hunted Indians with their dogs for sport. But most were killed by enslavement and disease. The Spanish discovered that it was cheaper to work Indians to death and replace them than to keep them alive: the life expectancy in their mines and plantations was three to four months. Within a century of their arrival, around 95% of the population of South and Central America had been destroyed.

In California during the 18th Century the Spanish systematised this extermination. A Franciscan missionary called Junipero Serra set up a series of “missions”: in reality concentration camps using slave labour. The native people were herded in under force of arms and made to work in the fields on one fifth of the calories fed to African-American slaves in the 19th century. They died from overwork, starvation and disease at astonishing rates, and were continually replaced, wiping out the indigenous populations. Junipero Serra, the Eichmann of California, was beatified by the Vatican in 1988. He now requires one more miracle to be pronounced a saint(2).

While the Spanish were mostly driven by the lust for gold, the British who colonised North America wanted land. In New England they surrounded the villages of the native Americans and murdered them as they slept. As genocide spread westwards, it was endorsed at the highest levels. George Washington ordered the total destruction of the homes and land of the Iroquois. Thomas Jefferson declared that his nation’s wars with the Indians should be pursued until each tribe “is exterminated or is driven beyond the Mississippi”. During the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864, troops in Colorado slaughtered unarmed people gathered under a flag of peace, killing children and babies, mutilating all the corpses and keeping their victims’ genitals to use as tobacco pouches or to wear on their hats. Theodore Roosevelt called this event “as rightful and beneficial a deed as ever took place on the frontier.”

The butchery hasn’t yet ended: last month the Guardian reported that Brazilian ranchers in the western Amazon, having slaughtered all the rest, tried to kill the last surviving member of a forest tribe(3). Yet the greatest acts of genocide in history scarcely ruffle our collective conscience. Perhaps this is what would have happened had the Nazis won the second world war: the Holocaust would have been denied, excused or minimised in the same way, even as it continued. The people of the nations responsible – Spain, Britain, the US and others – will tolerate no comparisons, but the final solutions pursued in the Americas were far more successful. Those who commissioned or endorsed them remain national or religious heroes. Those who seek to prompt our memories are ignored or condemned.

This is why the right hates Avatar. In the neocon Weekly Standard, John Podhoretz complains that the film resembles a “revisionist western” in which “the Indians became the good guys and the Americans the bad guys.”(4) He says it asks the audience “to root for the defeat of American soldiers at the hands of an insurgency.” Insurgency is an interesting word for an attempt to resist invasion: insurgent, like savage, is what you call someone who has something you want. L’Osservatore Romano, the official newspaper of the Vatican, condemned the film as “just … an anti-imperialistic, anti-militaristic parable”(5).

But at least the right knows what it is attacking. In the New York Times the liberal critic Adam Cohen praises Avatar for championing the need to see clearly(6). It reveals, he says, “a well-known principle of totalitarianism and genocide – that it is easiest to oppress those we cannot see”. But in a marvellous unconscious irony, he bypasses the crashingly obvious metaphor and talks instead about the light it casts on Nazi and Soviet atrocities. We have all become skilled in the art of not seeing.

I agree with its rightwing critics that Avatar is crass, mawkish and cliched. But it speaks of a truth more important – and more dangerous – than those contained in a thousand arthouse movies.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. David E Stannard, 1992. American Holocaust. Oxford University Press. Unless stated otherwise, all the historical events mentioned in this column are sourced to the same book.

2. http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-miracle28-2009aug28,0,2804203.story

3. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/dec/09/amazon-man-in-hole-attacked

4.http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/017/350fozta.asp

5. http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/2802155/Vatican-hits-out-at-3D-Avatar.html

6. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/26/opinion/26sat4.html