Two of my great, great grandfathers were in prison camps during the Civil War–one in Camp Douglas in Illinois and one in Andersonville in Georgia. My grandfather in Illinois survived smallpox and nursed the other prisoners in the camp. Most died either from harsh conditions or from the disease. He survived and returned home after the war, but was blind in one eye afterward.
The grandfather in Andersonville died there. The prison ran out of food months before the war ended, and many starved while others died of disease and dysentery. One of the guards said that they would have freed the prisoners, but they were afraid that the prisoners would kill them. My grandmother never knew what happened to him.
Imagine
This is hard for me to imagine. I try to put myself in the place of my great, great grandparents, to feel the emotions that they must have felt–the helplessness of never having control, not knowing when you would die and knowing it would be soon, seeing your friends die daily, wondering if your family and friends were still alive, what happened to your husband, wondering where he was buried because he never came home.
Do What You Must
I had a granduncle, one of many family members, in World War II. He was the fifteenth man off his boat at Normandy. He not only survived, but knocked out a German machine gun nest and earned a silver star. When asked why he was so determined to get rid of that machine gun nest, he replied, “They were killing my buddies. Somebody had to do something.” That simple. I often wonder if I could have done the same. I tell myself I could have, but I also have doubts. Pinned down by Nazi bullets coming at me, could I have wound myself through to a position to toss a grenade or shoot the men who were killing my buddies?
Murphy’s Law Opposite Day
When I was young and something I did came out right the first time, usually after several attempts by someone else, my mother would say, “You must have been holding your mouth right.” I still say this occasionally when something goes right, surprisingly, the first try. And when it goes wrong I must not have been holding my mouth right. You get the idea.
It seems that people nowadays are not holding their collective mouth right. How did our nation get to this point? Have we always been this selfish? Do we no longer care about children and the needy, neglected, and helpless of society? How can we not admire the gumption of immigrants who brave fierce odds to save their families and themselves?
I suggest that you watch World War II movies about the Nazis in Germany and Austria such as “The Big Red One.”. A good series is “Foyle’s War.” If you dare, watch some footage of the actual liberation of the concentration camps. Read about the treatment of black men, women and children in the South and other places too, during the Jim Crow era. Watch the movie “Twelve Years a Slave.” Learn about the rounding up of the Indigenous Tribes in North America.
Then close your eyes and imagine you are the slave, the black person trying not to offend a white person with an inferiority complex who wants to see you suffer, the prisoner who is a skeletal mass of skin and bone who still, somehow, moves. Your child or mother or brother or sister is being experimented on by Nazi doctors. You are cleaning the ash of your former prison camp mates out of the ovens to make room for more. Your whole tribe is put into jail to await forced removal to an alien environment where you have no resources except what the government that put you in jail will give you as they take and take and take what little you have left to offer.
Imagine your family is being sought out by a drug cartel in South America and you take what few belongings you can carry, hide your money and sneak away in the night to get to freedom only to find that what you thought was a sanctuary is now tossing you into separate warehouses with too few beds and toilets and not enough food. People die daily. You grieve for the family and friends you left behind and for your children and spouse in far off places, you don’t know where, and maybe alive.
Camps a Blessing?
When has a prison camp ever been thought of as a blessing? Liberation, yes. The camps, no.
I have cried. I have shouted. I have cursed at the government who is building concentration camps in our country. The masked ones who are seizing citizens and people who are trying to renew their visas and people with no papers and dumping them into prison camps in other countries. Those who refuse to admit a mistake and won’t try to rectify it. Who have no pity for the young adult who speaks only English and has lived in the U.S. almost all their life, and we send them to a country where they have never been in their living memory.
Whether we like it or not, we are a part of a much larger world. We must accept if not embrace people who don’t look like us, who don’t speak like us and who have different ideas. This is what makes us stronger and better. A society is like a muscle. If you don’t use it you lose it. If we let ourselves settle into a nice, comfy couch of a society where we are surrounded by others just like us, we are not using ourselves in the most efficient manner. We will become a limp society of weaklings. We are well on our way. We still tend towards an isolationist attitude, but we are dependent on the entire world and they are dependent on us. We need all others and all others need us. We are not just WASPs. We are citizens of the planet. We’d better start holding our mouths right.