Uncomfortable reminder
The separation of parents and children in the United States has reminded the world of the dreadful history of children in concentration camps, writes Wilson T. Bell, Assistant Professor of history and politics at Thompson Rivers University.
THE recent separation of migrant parents and children in the United States, and the dispatch of children to camps and other detention centres around the country, has reminded the world of the dreadful history of concentration camps and their emphasis on dismantling the family unit.
CHILDREN and family have been central to the institution of the concentration camp from its beginnings 120 years ago. Wikipedia has now added the notorious American border detention centres to its list of concentration camps, and the #FamiliesBelongTogether Twitter hashtag has brought up frequent comparisons.
The merits of the comparison between detention centres and concentration camps have been debated elsewhere, but can we learn anything from this dreadful history of children behind barbed wire, even as the Trump Administration finally moved to end the practice?
The British constructed camps during the 18991902 South African War in order to divide families. They hoped Boer men who were fighting British forces would give up once they discovered their wives and children were held in camps.
Similar to the Trump Administration’s apparent hope the breakup of families would deter unwanted migration, the British sought to deter Boer fighters. British parliamentarians critical of the policy labelled these “concentration camps”, alluding to the Spanish policy of the “reconcentration” of civilians during the SpanishAmerican War (1898).
Conditions in the Britishrun camps were horrific, particularly for children, with mortality rates upwards of 25%. An epidemic of measles accounted for roughly 40% of childhood deaths in these camps, and diseases such as typhus and dysentery were also devastating.
Soviet camps
The Soviet Union’s system of camps that reached their peak during Joseph Stalin’s rule from the 1930s to the 1950s also reveals the destruction of families. While mass arrests broke up the family, and children of “enemies of the people” were separated from their parents, there were also many children in the Gulag itself.
Prison camps developed an infrastructure that, on the surface, supported pregnancy and childbirth. There were maternity wards in some camp clinics, as well as nurseries, and pregnant women and nursing mothers officially received increased rations.
In practice, the system was regularly a nightmare. Children born in the camps were separated from their mothers, who managed to see them only at set times for nursing.
Hava Volovich, whose own daughter died in the camps, remembers that hundreds of camp children died each year, meaning there were “plenty of empty beds in the infants’ shelter even though the birth rate in the camps was relatively high”.
At the age of 2, many of the surviving children were sent either to orphanages or to relatives — a forced redistribution of children away from their parents, who, as Gulag prisoners, were at best stigmatised, and at worst seen as a major threat to Soviet society.
The Gulag also held camps for young offenders, where teenagers worked as forced labourers and faced horrific living conditions.
Nazis crushed families
Nazi policy included both largescale deportations and largescale importations of population groups, with major implications for families.
The Nazis removed citizenship from German Jews then, during the Second World War, sent most Jews, from Germany and elsewhere, to camps outside the borders of prewar Germany. Yet, as the war progressed, Germany brought in huge numbers of forced labourers from all over Europe (US Attorneygeneral Jeff Sessions’ claim that Germanrun camps were designed to keep Jews in, rather than out, is unfounded).
Nazi family policy was a pivotal part of the concentration camp. Once the death camps were operational, the Nazis crushed the family unit among undesirable populations, focusing on Jews.
The selection process at Auschwitz could result in the temporary survival of one or both parents, if they were physically fit (or just lucky), but children were usually sent directly to their deaths.
Jewish writer Elie Wiesel lost his mother and sister right away, and survived selection only because he lied about his age, claiming he was 18 and not 15, his actual age.
The unimaginable cruelty of many practices —the smashing of babies’ heads against walls, the medical experimentation, particularly on twins —reveals an extreme dehumanisation.
Even at the show camp of Terezin, which included a family camp, only 150 of the roughly 15,000 children sent there survived.
❛ In all cases, the dehumanisation of the unwanted population was a key starting point
High mortality rates
What do these historical cases have in common? All involved the separation, either immediate or eventual, of children from one or both parents, and all involved horrific conditions and extremely high mortality rates for the children.
In all cases, the dehumanisation of the unwanted population was a key starting point. As historian Aidan Forth writes of the South African case, General Herbert Kitchener referred to the
Boers as “savages with only a thin white veneer” and British officials often described the Afrikaners as “dirty, careless, [and lazy]”.
Former Gulag prisoners frequently reported that guards and officials referred to them as animals or as “scum”. As one former prisoner wrote, quoting a camp boss: “A person? . . . There aren’t any here! Here are enemies of the people, traitors of the motherland, bandits, crooks. The dregs of humanity, scum, riff raff, that’s who is here!”
The dehumanisation of the Nazi camps is well known, as Nazi propaganda frequently likened the Jews to vermin or to an infectious disease, making Trump’s tweet of June 20 about asylum seekers particularly chilling: ‘‘Democrats are the problem. They don’t care about crime and want illegal immigrants, no matter how bad they may be, to pour into and infest our Country, like MS13. They can’t win on their terrible policies, so they view them as potential voters!’’
Another commonality can be found in the experiences of the victims.
In all cases, children separated from parents could not have known if they would ever see their parents again, or under what circumstances. The children of the camps had to rely, for the most part, on other children, for any support or security. Often, the separation was permanent.
These comparisons only take us so far, however. Some commentators have looked not at European powers, but to a long North American history — including slavery and residential schools — of separating nonwhite children from their parents.
Outcry helped end practice
If there is any optimism to be found in the historical examples of children in concentration camps, perhaps the history of public reactions can provide some hope.
In South Africa, reports by Emily Hobhouse and then the Fawcett Commission, particularly on starving children, galvanised public pressure to force the British Government to improve conditions at the camps.
In contrast, in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, there could be neither public nor parliamentary discussion of inhumane internment conditions.
But today, some US reporters and lawmakers have visited the American detention centres, and nongovernmental organisations such as Amnesty International and even the Methodist Church, as well as many elected officials, maligned the policy.
The public discussion, and the public outcry against the separation of children from their parents that eventually caused Trump to cave and end the policy, perhaps makes the American case more similar to that of South Africa than either the Nazi or Soviet camps.
This similarity, however, depends on the actions now of the Trump Administration, which for several weeks before its reversal included denial, deflecting blame and even justification.
But with reports of children being torn away from their mothers’ arms while breastfeeding, the more notorious concentration camps of the 20th century must serve as a stark reminder that the act of dehumanisation is a slippery slope towards violence and further atrocities. —