One morning last week, I was reading about Josef Mengele’s horrific deeds in Nazi Germany. Later that same day, I saw the film The Voice of Hind Rajab. Both accounts of wanton cruelty tell us something terrifying about our present.
Mengele’s unspeakable torture of Jewish people, particularly children, as described by Claudio Magris in his classic book Danube, draws attention to more than a monstrous personal pathology. This medical doctor, in the name of scientific experimentation, enjoyed inflicting pain. More importantly, as Magris highlights, it was the system created by the Nazis that enabled Mengele’s evil to destroy countless lives.
The film about six-year-old Hind Rajab takes us inside the terror of Palestinian civilians being attacked even as they comply with the Israeli army’s evacuation order. Their car is riddled with machine-gun fire; all of Hind’s relatives are killed, leaving the little girl trapped in the half-crushed vehicle.
The Voice of Hind Rajab tells the real-life story of the workers at a rescue centre who kept talking to the trapped child over a cell phone, while they struggled desperately to arrange a rescue. All along Hind’s ordeal, an ambulance was only eight minutes away from the location where she was trapped. But the rescuers were prevented from reaching the child by interlocking loops of bureaucracy and permissions. If the ambulance moved without a “green light” from the Israeli army, its staff would be killed.
Eventually, even though the ambulance was granted the “green light” and managed to reach the site where Hind was trapped, the child and the rescuers were killed by the Israeli army. The film is based on actual recordings of Hind’s conversations with the rescue centre, and the sequence of events has been verified by international agencies.
At one point in the film, one of the staff at the rescue centre cries out in mind-numbing anguish that the Israeli army has gadgets that will show that there is someone alive in the crushed vehicle. Why is no one getting the child out of the wreckage and getting her to a hospital?
This is where Hind Rajab’s story reminds us of a terrifying truth that affects all of us, no matter how far we are from any combat zone. Namely, the rupture of action from conscience.
This happens at two levels: Systemic and individual.
Most of the atrocities committed against human beings and ecosystems in the 20th century were done by people who claimed they were just doing their job. This is what Adolf Eichmann, who served virtually as CEO of the project to exterminate Jews, said at his trial in Jerusalem.
Listening to his testimony led the political philosopher Hannah Arendt to coin the term “banality of evil”.
The American decision to drop atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki drew on the same ethos of “just do the job”. Some of the scientists who had helped to invent the bomb pleaded that since the Nazis were being defeated by conventional warfare, there was no need to use the atom bomb. Calling Russian and Japanese representatives to observe the test of the atomic weapon, some argued, would tilt the power balance in favour of the US. This cry failed to be heard, and over one lakh fifty thousand civilian Japanese died after horrific suffering.
While the systemic dimension produces dramatic events, the individual dimension may be more insidious and dangerous. For this causes otherwise law-abiding and moderately moral human beings to feel so much fear and hatred towards some “other” that anything done to this “other” seems justified.
The ongoing conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians is just one manifestation of this phenomenon, which seems to be gathering momentum in societies across the world – including India.
I belong to the generation born in the 1950s, who were brought up to believe that humanity has learned its lesson. Horrors like the Holocaust, Hiroshima-Nagasaki and Partition violence will not be allowed to happen again.
To many young people today, we oldies seem to have “fallen” for a false and naïve assumption. Actually, we never “assumed” that the 21st century would be more humane. What we do have is the faith that societies can learn from mistakes, and each individual act of goodness and compassion counts.
Often, rejection of this faith is nothing but moral laziness dressed up as nihilism. Yes, the material power of the tank that crushed the car with the child inside must be dealt with. Cruelty and injustice must be stopped. The question is: How?
If it is by adopting the same amoral ethos that kills countless children like Hind Rajab and their rescuers – then is anyone really saved?
As lone individuals or as small groups, we may not know how our actions will eventually overcome the systemic injustice. Yet every time we stand up for compassion, every time we refuse to join those braying for the blood of some “other”, an essential truth is reaffirmed.
That every single act of putting conscience ahead of action counts.
Bakshi is the founder of the YouTube channel ‘Ahimsa Conversations’
The Voice of Hind Rajab tells the real-life story of the workers at a rescue centre who kept talking to the trapped child over a cell phone, while they struggled desperately to arrange a rescue. 
Share
