Camps of cruelty a global concern
This well-researched history of concentration camps is consistently fascinating, writes Malcolm Forbes.
Concentration camps have been in existence for more than 100 years. What’s more, every country has at some point used them.
Andrea Pitzer arrests her reader with these two startling facts at the beginning of her gruelling yet
engrossing study, One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration
Camps. Trawling archives and drawing on testimonies from prisoners and guards, Virginia-based Pitzer reveals how concentration camps evolved over the course of the past century and became a byword for injustice and a blight on humanity.
Pitzer opens in 1890s Cuba with Spanish forces implementing the extreme strategy of reconcentracion. Three hundred thousand Cuban civilians were herded into makeshift camps, or ‘‘miniature citadels of suffering’’.
The book’s standout chapters focus on the devastation wreaked by Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany. The first gulag was established in 1923 on the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea, after which whole archipelagos proliferated across the land. In these frozen hells, inmates worked until they dropped.
Pitzer notes that, ‘‘For the rest of the century the Gulag would serve as a model and a muse for other revolutionary states’’; and in later sections she examines the ‘‘stepchildren of the Gulag’’ in Cambodia, North Korea and China.
Pitzer’s other prominent chapter tracks the ugly expansion of the Third Reich and the grotesque development of its Konzentrationslager system. We go from the first camp, which opened a mere month after Hitler assumed power in 1933, to bigger fortresses such as Dachau, and then arrive at the Final Solution and ‘‘the apotheosis of horror’’, the death camps.
‘‘Anything was possible at Auschwitz, and nothing made sense,’’ Pitzer writes. Concentration camps should have died after the abomination of Auschwitz. Instead they multiplied, rearing their ugly heads in the likes of Kenya, Chile and Myanmar. The book ends where it began, in Cuba, specifically Guantanamo, a place Pitzer argues has gone from refugee camp to detention camp to concentration camp.
For some, this claim will be contentious. It isn’t alone. World War I internment camps, for instance, are hardly comparable with Bergen-Belsen. There are also notable omissions: Pitzer devotes only two paragraphs to the 1990s Balkans, and doesn’t venture into the Middle East.
But what Pitzer does relate is consistently fascinating. Her book is at its most absorbing, and affecting, when it follows the fates of individual prisoners – real people who suffered, endured and articulated the unspeakable.