La vita è bella

This is a simple story but not an easy one to tell. Like a favour there is sorrow and like a favour it is full of wonder and happiness...

These lines bang in the opening scene of the Italian film La vita è bella (In English, Life is beautiful), a Miramax release in 1997, written and directed by Roberto Benigni (Story co-authored by Vincenzo Cerami). In the film Robert Benigni himself plays the role of Guido Orefice, the Jewish book keeper at Carto Libreria in Arezzo, Italy of 1930s, the loving husband of Dora (Cast: Nicoletta Braschi) and the caring father of Eliseo Orefice, kid Joshua (Cast: Giorgio Cantarini). The film says the inhumane story of the ‘Holy Holocaust’ the genocide of approximately six million European Jews during World War II, a programme of systematic state-sponsored extermination by Nazi Germany. As reported by the Philadelphia City Paper in 1998 about the film, “Robert Benigni uses laughter to fight the horrors of the Holocaust...”
At the 71st Academy Awards in 1998, the film has won both the Academy Awards for Best Original Dramatic Score and Best Foreign Language Film and Benigni has won Award for the Best Actor.

Let us have a look on the details of this film.

The first half of the film is really enjoyable with funniest moments of Guido’s life where he meets his lover at Arezzo town and which leads to their life together. In his earlier life at the town, Guido used to be there in a hotel as a waiter. Guido’s enchanting words while he proposes himself to Dora are really heartfelt and touching, the one which I ever heard.
He says:
“...you can’t imagine how much I feel like making love to you. But I never tell anyone especially to you. Someone will have to torture me to say it. I just want to make love to you not just once but as far often as I can...”
Dora’s reply was very simple too, “...please take me along...”
Guido and Doro had a lovely kid and had lived happily together until the German force occupied parts of Italy.
The second half of the film starts with the ruthless story of the ‘Holocaust’ in Europe. Guido with Joshua and Uncle Leo has been put in to the wagon to the concentration camp in which Dora also volunteer to get in. In the attempt to hold his family together and help his son to survive the horrors of the concentration camp, Guido tells kid Joshua that the Holocaust is a game and the grand prize for winning 1000 point is a brand new military tank which is the favourite of Joshua. At the very first day in the camp, even if he doesn’t know German, Guido volunteer to translate what the soldiers ordered to the inmates and he makes it funny for kid Joshua.
It is interesting to hear the translation like,
“...there are many ways to lose points in this game, 1. Turning in to a big cry-baby; 2. Telling everyone that you want to see your mamma; 3. If you are hungry of water and something to eat, forget about it...”
Actually the army man was telling some rules and regulations for the inmates but clever Guido really makes it for kid Joshua.
The inmates are being introduced to heavy work for hours but the soldiers never allowed the old men and women and kids to work and they were all guided to the gas chamber, the death place. Guido never allowed Joshua to be come out before the soldiers as he knows about the gas shower.
The film moves along the life of Guido and Joshua in the camp where all the inmates are seen saddened and guilty. Dora is being kept far away from the room of Guido.
Towards the end of the film, the scenes from the camp are like just after the World War is called off. When the losing Army vacate the camp, in between the roaring machine guns, Guido try to run out with Joshua and to find out Dora, but he finds the way to receive the gunshots. He marches like a funny soldier in the eyes of Joshua who is safe there in a box with a small square opening. He has already made his swear to his papa that he won’t come outside till no one is there around. In the very next dawn, the inmates of the camp really breathe out fresh air. Little Joshua comes out of the box before a big military tank of the Soviet army and he realizes that his papa was true in the case of the prize for the game that they have been ‘enjoying’ there for the last many days. Picked up by the captain of the tank, Joshua enjoys a ride on it and he finds his mamma on the way.
....And that is the end of the film...

My dear readers, kindly do not be confused on what I am trying to say here. It was so co-incidental that I have first seen this film in an evening, a couple of days before October 9, 2010, which was a remarkable, exciting (?) day in my life. I will not be able to keep away from the memories of this day. My heartbeats had grown up as ever before while I was inside an old Nazi concentration camp at Oranienburg, Germany on that day. It was on an official engagement that I with my colleagues, Mr Girigan (Giri) and Ms Rumana had a chance to be there at Hannover in Germany for sometimes. We stayed at the student apartment Dorothenstraβe and worked wirh the Institute of Environmental Planning, Leibniz University of Hannover for three months from August to November, 2010. Mr Monish, who is working with the Institute, was literally our guide when we tried to understand the bits and pieces of Germany. He was used to be depicted as a ‘Berliner’ by our colleagues there, as he was there in Berlin for a long time for doing his Post Graduation.

While preparing for my first foreign country visit, literally I was blank in the sense; I hadn’t any plans to roam around the new (for me!) country. But the intercultural training that we had attended there at the University really dragged the traveller inside me out to explore the country as much as possible. We started to Berlin on October 7th at 7AM from Hannover hauptbahnhof (Central station). It was my very first experience with the bullet train which travels at 200 km per hour on an average and the aim was an official network project meeting.

I can’t just pass over the third day at Berlin on which we two, I and Giri were historians who tried to dig out the ‘fairy-tale’ of Germany at the World War II with the help of Monish, the ‘Berliner’. The day dawned at City Hostel, Berlin, near Mohrenstaβe where we had a good nap in the night. Charly’s check point was the first target of the day followed by the Berlin wall monument and be frank, we two were really bare, just because we had the Berliner to mark our way! In fact it was my suggestion to explore a Nazi concentration camp (Konzentrationslager in German) somewhere in the country after walking along the patches of Berliner Mauer (Berlin Wall). I really wanted to give a good description of this celebrated wall here but that will work better in another occasion, here our centre of attention is the place of ‘holy holocaust’, I think.

Konzentrationslager (KZ - The Nazi Concentration Camps)

.......All Communists and—where necessary—Reichsbanner and Social Democratic functionaries who endanger state security are to be concentrated here, as in the long run it is not possible to keep individual functionaries in the state prisons without overburdening these prisons, and on the other hand these people cannot be released because attempts have shown that they persist in their efforts to agitate and organise as soon as they are released.....

These lines are quoted directly from the press statement given at the opening of the very first Nazi camp in Germany, at Dachau 1933. It was the first regular concentration camp established by the coalition government of National Socialist German Workers' Party (Nazi Party) and the German Nationalist People's Party. The etymology of the word concentration is simple and denotes that a group of people, who are in some way undesirable in one place, have been concentrated where they can be watched by those who imprisoned them. Once the Nazis came to power in Germany, they quickly moved to brutally suppress all potential opposition. Between the years 1933 and 1945, more than 3.5 million Germans would be forced to spend time in concentration camps or prisons for political reasons and approximately 77,000 Germans were executed for one or another form of resistance by special courts, courts martial, and the civil justice system. After 1939, with the beginning of the World War II, the concentration camps were increasingly became places where the opponents (enemies?) of the Nazis were enslaved, gassed, starved, tortured and killed. During the War, several camps were created near centres of dense “undesirable” populations, often focusing on areas with large communities of Jews, Polish intelligentsia, communists or Roma in Europe. Since millions of Jews lived in pre-war Poland, most camps were located in the area of General Government occupied Poland for logistical reasons. It also allowed the Nazis to transport the German Jews outside of the German main territory. The concentration camps were best characterized by the absence of any legal norms. This vacuum caused the inmates to be subjected to systematic and arbitrary violence, both physically and mentally. Every single prisoner had lived with the constant threat of being maltreated or killed. The high mortality rate in the camps was not merely the result of the catastrophic overall conditions but also of mass murder campaigns undertaken, in fact the exact number of the victims would never be known.

Nazism, the ‘Aryan blood propaganda’

Let me say something about the German history which marks the rise of the Nazi movement as background for the ‘holy holocaust’. The Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Workers' Party – NSDAP – the Nazi Party) and the Nazi Germany was following the ideology of Nationalsozialismus (National Socialism) which was a form of fascism and has got some traces of biological racism and anti-semitism. Members of the Nazi Party had tried to call themselves as Nationalsozialisten (National Socialists), not as Nazis. They believed in the supremacy of an Aryan master race and had claimed that the Germans only represent the pure Aryan nation. This concept had asserted that Europeans are the descendants of Indo-Iranian settlers, people of ancient India and ancient Persia, the Aryans. They used to believe in ‘High and Noble’ Aryan culture and Parasitic/Semitic cultures of others. It is evident that the Nazi ideology was influenced by the acts of Otto von Bismarck, the founder of the German Empire. The Nazis were dedicated to continue the process of creating a unified German nation state against the Jewish-infiltrated German Parliament, which in their view Bismarck had begun and desired to achieve. They always argued against the Jews as pushed by a postcard from Austria in 1919 which blamed Jews for Germany's defeat in World War I. It was in 1919, the Verbindungsmann (police spy) of Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (DAP — German Workers' Party - the predecessor of NSDAP), Mr Adolf Hitler turned as a propagandist of Nazism. To rescue Germany from the effects of the post World War 1 depression, Nazism promoted an economic position, a managed economy that was neither capitalist nor communist. Later in 1933, Hitler became adorned as the Chancellor of Germany who established the Dritte Reich (Third Reich), denoting Nazi Germany as the historical successor to the First Reich of the Holy Roman Empire (962–1806). The Swastika symbol of Nazi Germany was the result of Hitler’s observation on German mythology in which it represents the beginning of all creations; in fact, he was beginning to create his ideal world.

The Oranienburg concentration camp

I was just trying to justify my historian-mind at the same time giving signs to my dear readers about the racial war against the Jews which created the horrors of Holocaust. Even though the camp shown in the above said film was somewhere in Italy, the atmosphere is the same everywhere and that is why I wanted to recall the film scenes often when I pass through the corridors and corners of this camp. Let me mark the way to the camp from Berlin first. We three, Giri, Monish and I had started from Potsdamerplatz railway station in a local Deutch Bahn (DB) service to get down at Oranienburg, a town located on the banks of the Havel river, 35 km north of the centre of Berlin. It took almost 45 minutes to get down at Oranienburg station. From the station, instead of waiting for a bus to Sachsenhausen (one among the 9 districts of Oranienburg), we had a good walk for half an hour, about 2 kilometres to reach what is today, Sachsenhausen Memorial at around 11:00 AM in the sunny morning. I really couldn’t believe that I was standing in front of such a terrific place where millions of people had been enslaved for the sake of the so-called racial war. This camp was one of the first detention facilities established by the Nazis when they gained power in 1933. It might be a disused factory/brewery, the history says. It held the Nazis' political opponents from the Berlin region, mostly members of the Communist Party of Germany and social-democrats. In 1935, it was replaced by the Sachsenhausen concentration camp which continued to operate until the end of the Nazi regime, It was calculated that around hundred million people were killed here before the liberation of the camp by the Soviet Red Army in 1945. The remaining buildings and grounds are now open to the public as a museum from 1956. Several buildings and structures still survive or have been reconstructed, including guard towers, the camp entrance, crematory ovens and the camp barracks. Oranienburg concentration camp existed only during the first two years of the Nazi dictatorship, from March 1933 until July, 1934. Oranienburg concentration camp is still often confused with Sachsenhausen concentration camp which was not built until 1936, using the prisoners’ labour. After the National Socialists’ seizure of power in January 1933, a large number of concentration camps were set up throughout Germany to ‘settle the score’ with political opponents. Commandants and guard units were recruited from the Sturmabteilung (SA – the 'storm section', the ‘Brownshirts’, Hitler's support army, the paramilitary wing of the NSDAP) in its ‘fight on the streets’ against the Republic. The National Socialists used the early concentration camp of Oranienburg in their public presentation of the Nazi regime and conveyed a sanitised propaganda picture of ‘re-training through sports and hard work. The daily beatings, torture and murders were omitted from those pictures. The first reports of these, by former prisoners who had emigrated, mark Oranienburg concentration camp as an epitome for the inhumanity of the National Socialist system throughout the world. Later in 1934, the camp was taken over by Schutzstaffel (SS- the 'defence squadron', the ‘blackshirts’, which is formed originally as a personal bodyguard for Hitler).
After having a glance over the museum specimens, we moved to the camp halls where the toilets, washrooms, cots, mess facilities (?) and jail block had been reconstructed. As per the description given there before the washroom, in the mornings, at certain times up to 400 prisoners would be squeezed in to a barrack. They had been allotted only 30 minutes for waking up, rations being handed out, washing, then on to roll call. Consequently 8 to 10 people would be standing at two bath basins with only cold water springing- like a fountain- from the middle. Prisoners were only allowed to use the Water Closets (WC- Wasser Closets in German) and urinals in the mornings and evenings after roll call, occasionally also during the mid-day break, whenever they would have only few minutes to spare. The sick, weakened or older inmates who might have fallen down in the rush were trampled on by others and remained on the floor covered in excrements. The wash rooms and toilets were also yet other sites of terror. SS guards are known to have drowned prisoners in the basin for washing feet and WCs!

The jail block was one of the very first buildings in the camp which prisoners had to build in 1936, according to the plans drawn up by the SS. The T-shaped building with 3 wings served as a jail for both camp inmates and Gestapo prisoners. Hidden from the view by a wall, it became imprinted on the memory of former prisoners as a secretive place where gruesome murders and many other forms of abuse were carried out.
I recalled the words of Guido, walking along the jail block, carrying sleeping Joshua,
“... I know in the morning, mam will wake us and bring two nice glasses of milk, coffee and toffees. First thing we will do is eat and then I will make love to her two or three times, if I can...”

While moving along, the next section was the incineration point specially designed for a couple of gruesome action. The remaining has been well preserved with sign boards and descriptions. As per the description, the inmates selected for murder were allowed to enter the undressing room and were led from there either directly in to the gas chamber or in to the doctor’s room. There, SS personnel dressed in white coats examined the inmates and marked those who had gold teeth or fillings to be collected later after the incineration! In this room, there was also a gramophone on which loud music was played. From this room the inmate would be carried to the actual execution room. A gas chamber was also installed in 1943 in a room with working showers. Liquid Cyclon Binto filled bottles were used inside the ventilation system that opens at the showers.

Kid Joshua started yelling on my ears, “...I don’t want to do it, I don’t want to do it, I don’t want to do it...” while he reports to his loving father that he has been invited by the soldiers to take a shower, of course, the gas shower! Dora’s eyes searching for the wears of Joshua just after a group has been showered, really haunting me and those will trouble me ever I live. Again, Dora’s eyes after hearing Guido’s and Joshua’s sounds through the loudspeaker are giving me a chance to breath.

The last point which we came across was another execution place where the sentenced had been hanged in ‘holy tippets’, connected in three pillars in a raw. While Giri tried for some fun there, I had nothing to say but I could have at least said that, “it is so simple to have fun now” and while clicking the camera, I was mute.

“...what a place this is, I never had so much fun...”
I just recalled Guido’s words to his kid, while he was trying to calm down the kiddie feels of Joshua. Hats off to you dear Guido, it is none other than you who won the game!

Around 3:00 PM, we decided to move back to Berlin as we had to reserve our tickets back to Hannover and had to leave Berlin on the same day evening. I was really exhausted and blank throughout the day as the eyes of Dora came to my mind quite often to disturb me.

The words of Andrzej Szczypiorski, a former prisoner of this camp was haunting me throughout the return travel to Berlin.

“... And I know one thing more-that the Europe of the future cannot exist without commemorating all those, regardless of their nationality, who were killed at that time with complete contempt and hate, who were tortured to death, starved, gassed, incinerated and hanged...” (as expressed in 1995 and marked there in the camp wall).
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My dear readers, thanks for being with me through this travelogue.

REFERENCE:
1. The English version of the film, La vita è bella
2. My life (‘eyes and ears’) at Germany
3. http://en.wikipedia.org
4. Philadelphia City Paper, article Archives, October 29–November 5, 1998

I take this opportunity to mark my deep sense of indebtedness to all my team members Dr Anil Kumar, Dr Martina, Melvin, Giri, Gopal, Rumana, Isabelle, Lydia, Monish and Hannah for their support and concern throughout my life at Germany. Thanks to Monish for introducing me to both the film and the camp. I am requesting my German friends to let me know/help me if I went wrong in any part of this document.



Last but not least, I extend my love and affection to my sweet heart, who joined me recently (and in fact who was really waiting for me all the time when I was enjoying this trip), without whose encouragement, support and concern, this piece of writing would not have been here in this shape.

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Photo 1
Zwischen Propaganda und Terror (Between Propaganda and Terror): Baudenkmal Berliner Mauer(Berlin Wall Monument), Giri and me facing the longest remaining stretch of Berlin Wall - Photo credit: Monish


Photo 2
Visitors at the Berlin Wall Monument Museum at Wilhelmerstraβe 98 (The remains of the Inspectorate of concentration camps)


Photo 3
The Sign board at Oranienburg showing the Sachsenhausen memorial and Oranienburg Museum



Photo 4
The entrance of the Sachsenhausen memorial


Photo 5
Museum specimens - the Nazi uniform with Swastika symbol, the prisoners’ uniform


Photo 6
Inside of the camp showing the toilets, bath tubs, cots and jail block


Photo 7
The jail inside the camp


Photo 8
The crematory ovens inside the camp


Photo 9
Den Opfern Des KZ Sachesenhausen- In memory of the victims of the Sachesenhausen concentration camp


Photo 10
Giri, having fun at the brutal pillars


Photo 10
The wall paper of the film, La vita è bella and scenes showing the life at camp


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