Europeans often ask me about the female foeticide tragedy in India; but I?ve always considered it Western exaggeration from an incidental case or two. Until I read about Revathy (21), an autodriver?s wife in Tamil Nadu, whose prematurely born twin girls were put on incubators last month. Within 2 weeks Revathy slit one baby?s throat while her mother, Thennila (45), strangled the other. They confessed they could not bear the heavy expenditure of medical treatment today and dowry tomorrow.
This horrible socio-cultural practice in ?Incredible India,? the world?s biggest hub for IT services, kills 750,000 girls every year as per UN figures. Shockingly, gender detection technology innovations like ultrasound, scans and amniocentesis contribute to the rise in genocide of unborn girls. Such killings took me back to Adolf Hitler?s order for mass scale euthanasia of invalids in 1939. Brandenburg, one of 6 mercy killing centres to eliminate ?life unworthy of life? was the first Nazi experiment with gassing. Disguised as shower rooms, the gas chambers were actually hermetically sealed chambers connected by pipes to cylinders of carbon monoxide. Mentally retarded, physically deformed and chronically ill patients were drugged and led naked into the gas chamber. Families were falsely informed the cause of death to be heart failure or pneumonia.
My European life started as a sweeper in a lithography printing shop near Paris. Not conversant with French, my colleagues and I would gesticulate exchanges about World War II films. I?d adventured into France in 1973 at age 19 to find Art, with nothing more than $8 in my pocket, and somehow managed basement residence at the Cite Univercitire campus. The common room TV set, something I?d never experienced before, engrossed me with war movies about Germany against the Allies. As they were in French, I gauged them as simple Hollywood entertainment. A French colleague called Jean used to say, ?Ce n?est pas marrant?? meaning ?It?s not fun.?
Ten years later when I?d shifted from shopfloor wage worker to a strategy making designer, I met and worked with several Jewish people in France, Europe and US. Till then the difference between Jews and Catholics had escaped me. My Paris-born 7-year-old son started narrating Holocaust stories he learnt about from Jewish friends in his private school. When he was 13, he obliged me to take him to Poland, describing concentration camp atrocities at Birkenau and Auschwitz. It appeared like American propaganda to me.
Crossing Poland?s beautiful countryside, we discovered an unused, grass covered train track. Advancing further a T junction appeared, the train track forming the vertical bar, and Birkenau entry gate the horizontal bar. From a distance this extermination camp looked like holiday resort chalets housed in 175 hectares. Actually, the compound was designed for 200,000 prisoners and at its peak, 4000 exterminations were done per day. This infamous Birkenau and Auschwitz death factory is the world?s largest cemetery where 1.6 million fatally gassed Jews are buried. Just before the war ended, Himmler ordered the gas chambers be destroyed to erase evidence of Nazi crime.
Arriving at Birkenau I strayed far in search of those gas chambers. Suddenly the fog rolled in, the light started fading, and I couldn?t see much ahead. Shivering, I started walking fast. Misty clouds enveloped me, the horrors of torture invaded my mind, and I felt besieged by hordes of people in striped pyjamas, chasing me as I started to run, stumbled, falling 8 times, until I arrived panting to my worried family.
At Auschwitz the next day ?Arbeit Macht Frei? meaning ?Work makes you free? was written on the entrance gate . Adolf?s ghastly work had high precision, meticulous command and communication. An orchestra would play music to welcome unsuspecting prisoners to the concentration camp. They had no idea of their impending fate: would they be labourers or tortured, shot or gassed?
This macabre experience touched my inner depths. Never being able to forget it, I regularly go to pay homage there. I realized now why Jean, my shopfloor friend, said those films that so enthused me were not entertaining, but painful.
Walking the Jewish district of Kazimierz recently in Poland?s 7th century town Krakow, waves of Yiddish songs led me to a synagogue. A bookstore sold me a DVD by Bernard Offen, tattoo number Process B7850, on surviving the Kracow ghetto holocaust.
When Offen was brought to Birkenau in 1942, a dictatorial thumb indication sent his father one way, and him the other. He later discovered that old people were directly sent to gas chambers, and the young to labour camps. Goose pimples run through me as I vividly experience his horrible sufferings. A fellow prisoner saved his life by saying: ?You must run when the inspector calls you, and look at his shoes.? That would establish he is fit for work, and obedient. With fifty family members exterminated, Offen was lucky to miraculously find, after 50 years, his brothers in Italy. One brother?s concentration camp job had been to move dead bodies after Nazi court martials. One day this brother went under a pile of dead bodies and hid there. When the Nazis left at night, he wiggled out before suffocating there, and escaped.
Statistically, a million girls will be murdered at birth in India every year. My discomfort refers to decisive killing of baby girls, not to normal abortion that is a human right. According to UNICEF, ?A report from Bombay in 1984 on abortions after prenatal sex determination stated that 7,999 out of 8,000 aborted fetuses were females. Sex determination has become a lucrative business.? Slaughter of girls is different from Nazi euthanasia only in that a parent commits murder, not the State Establishment. What does this say of people in the world?s biggest democracy?
?Shombit Sengupta is an international Creative Business Strategy consultant to top management. Reach shombit@shininguniverse.co