ON JUNE 27, German-Cypriot Forum (DZF) organised a one-day conference in Germany to celebrate its 10th year. The venue for the event was Osthofen SS Concentration Camp; the first concentration camp that would inspire the design of more horrible ones such as Dachau, Papenburg, Auschwitz and Majdanek.
The inhumane treatment and barbarism began here and National Socialists practised degradation and torture of individuals on a small scale in preparation for the honed extermination of millions. Those imprisoned were communists, social democrats, trade union members, independent thinkers, Jews, Christians, Atheists, Sinti and Roma. The camp was in operation for two years.
None of the prisoners was killed during the days at Osthofen. However, without the commonplace nature of camps such as Osthofen or without the process by which the majority grew accustomed to discrimination, marginalisation and destruction of the unwanted and without a nationwide tolerance for places like this in the middle of Germans’ ordinary everyday lives, Auschwitz would have never happened.
To date, it has not been possible to determine the exact number of victims who were murdered by deathly injections with potassium cyanide at SS Hinzert concentration camp located in the same neighbourhood as Osthofen. The dead toll is estimated to be between 321 and 1,000. The murdered prisoners were hastily buried in mass graves hidden in the large forest.
Since 2003, the permanent Memorial Exhibition was laid out at two former concentration camps; Osthofen (near Worms, 1933-1934) and Hinzert (near Trier, 1939-1945).
Those two sites having an embarrassing history were arranged by Rhineland Palatinate Central Office for Political Education and the Förderverein Projekt Osthofen e.V. to serve as National Socialist Documentation Centre for empowerment of memorial work.
The school children who visit the project undertake work related to understanding and confronting their history. The target group is students at the gymnasium level who have the capacity to comprehend the truth about atrocities and exhumations. The teaching techniques used are:
* Presentation of the historical and political background to the two concentration camps
* Informative exhibition boards with an enriched textual and graphical material
* Detailed biographies of victims and perpetrators
* Interactive maps and films released during the National Socialist era
* Audio material on selected exhibition topics
* 3D animation
* PC Stations in a separate room for in-depth research
* Memorial stones
At the conference, journalist Sevgul Uludag and three members of Missing Persons’ Families in Cyprus made an outstanding presentation and shared their own stories and experiences with the experts and audience there.
Starting a professional memorial project and creating a similar memorial site in Cyprus emerged as urgent homework for us as a result of this conference.
Whether it will be an NGO or an autonomous body established by the two side’s leaderships, it’ll definitely help transformation of the two different missing persons rhetoric on both sides into a single shared one. As Sevgul very eloquently put it: “Our common pain is our common future”.
In a parallel session at the conference, I was one of the speakers for a discussion panel about the current political situation in Cyprus. When the moderator questioned out how far a political settlement is, my memory flashed back through the masterpiece film Eternity and A Day by Theo Angelopoulos. The title of the film was the answer to the question: “How far is tomorrow?”.
A Cyprus solution is both far like eternity and a day, I said. I’m sure the prisoners at the SS camps faced the same solid question and answer at the time and vicious circle of uncertainty was the main fact of life like ours today.
I concluded by saying, as the local actors a the film being played out in Cyprus, we have a little room to manoeuvre unless international actors pop in and put an end to this everlasting conflict.
One can ask how I can feel so reliant upon external powers. Sorry about that, but as the children of this native land, we betrayed the child in us all and wasted most of our inner good. We seem to have lost our sense of ethical justice and haven’t been able to hold on to each other in solidarity.
Is there any domestic remedy to self-centred Greek Cypriot bias on power-sharing or to primitive Turkish Cypriot fait accompli on property or to the polarised positions of both parties on security?
The rule of international law must prevail to stop intransigence, although it is going to impose a costly prescription to certain people who have got everything going for them and established their comfort in the absence of peace. It is the greatest morale boost for peacebuilding volunteers like us to remember that Chaos is always pregnant to Cosmos.
For me European citizenship is a scale with two pans on balance. One part of it is full of rights and freedoms, while the other is full of liabilities and obligations. An EU citizen or an authority cannot have limitless enjoyment of those rights without meeting equivalent liabilities.
Therefore, Big Bang should be brought in to the Cypriots’ doorsteps by the international community; it must be imminent and inescapable. Tomorrow has a potential to come closer like the following day rather than been kept as eternity more than half a century far away.
NB: information on the Memorial Sites of Osthofen and Hinzert came from the booklets published by Rhineland Palatinate Central Office for Political Education
