MAUS

Blog number 310 **** 20 June 2009

So I'm reading this comix called, "Maus." It's a biography about a man's father who describes what it was like in the concentration camps in Germany during the Good War.

One of the stories tells of this old man who, at every appel (a counting of prisoners) would loudly complain, "I don't belong here with these Polacks and Yids, I am a German like you. I have medals from the Kaiser. My SON is a German soldier."

He eventually disappeared. The man telling the story couldn't remember exactly, but he was either sent to the gas chambers or a guard pushed him down and jumped on his neck.

Now what struck me was not so much that his guy was being treated unfairly and nobody would listen to him, but that he was thinking only of how badly HE was being treated. He had no concern at all of the thousands of other human beings there with him that were being treated as he was.

And more, I don't believe that that man was all that different from the great majority of humans that populate this Earth. We have not yet matured enough as a species for that type of behavior not to be the norm. Seems a shame, but there it is. Nothing anyone can do about it.

Me and mine, not you and yours.

I woke up this morning thinking about the above and it struck me that if the guy was really a Jew and was just trying to get better treatment or even get relased, then that would seem an honorable thing to do. Like trying to get out of a body of water instead of drowning. It was him complaining that he wasn't like these other "guys" and thus didn't deserve the same treatment as they did that struck me as maybe in a pre-karmic way, "deserved."

I wonder what I would have done in similar circumstances.

Bad Mojo any way you look at it. Bad times. Bad people. Yuk.