Inhumane
It is at once fascinating and dreadful to read the war-time accounts of prisoners of war, inscribing for posterity their impressions, their fears and their hopes during their long incarcerations. They had fought and survived, only to be taken prisoners of war. Waiting, tedious long days, months and years to survive their additional torment. Held prisoner in a foreign country, knowing nothing of the welfare of their loved ones back home, barely subsisting on inadequate rations, frail of health and of hope, with no medical care.And observing in the characters of those around them the best and the worst of human nature. Those who demonstrated care and charity toward others even while they themselves were needy and desperate to survive. And those whose misery fraught with fear for their survival left them suspicious of their companions and ready to avail themselves of any kinds of survival benefits, withholding anything they could, from others.
It would come as a shock to the good-hearted, stalwart and honest men, once liberation became reality, that the newly-liberated prisoners of war, behaved as atrociously to the population whose military had so latterly held them in the meanest disregard, as to deny their humanity. Desperately starving civilians were abused, children and young girls used as sex objects in exchange for the merest trifles of food.
In the daily journal of one Canadian prisoner of war, still awaiting dispatch out of the prisoner-of-war camp in Germany where he had been held along with thousands of others in inhumane conditions barely sufficient to assure the continuation of life, the descriptions of the counter-inhumanity of former prisoners toward the civilian population itself on the verge of starvation and death is horrific reading.
Reminiscent of the return of Jewish refugees, rescued as the living dead from death camps, to their little villages in Poland, where welcoming committees of former neighbours were anxious to demonstrate how prepared they were to accept those Jews, by organizing gallows parties in fear that the possessions of those Jews so treasured by their neighbours would have to be returned to their rightful owners.
Labels: Human Relations, Human Rights, Realities
posted by Pieface @ Wednesday, November 11, 2009
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