#tom riddlexhermione granger

[nerysdax]

PSA about putting Tomione in real life Nazi settings

After I’ve gotten some more questions as to why I have issues with writing a Tomione with the holocaust as subject (see this post: http://nerysdax.tumblr.com/post/173906911067/lust ) when I normally am pretty much “write what you want and fuck the haters”, I was wondering why and how to properly word it. Yesterday night I couldn’t find the words. It hit too close to home. Here’s why.

When I was a young teenager, I became obsessed with WW2. I don’t remember exactly what started it, probably the combination of a book (about heroic people fighting the Germans and crossing the channel to flee to England) and the knowledge my still young grandparents went through that war. I was fascinated. Wanted to know everything. I badgered them. My grandfather had been in a German labor camp and my grandmother had done some minor resistance work by delivering fake identity documents. They as so many of their generation didn’t want to talk about it, but I learned snippets of their history. Now I know I was asking them to relive a horrible time, back then I was a curious youngster, who didn’t understand and I wanted to know and learn about this war. I wrote terrible Mary Sue stories about my shooting Hitler and saving the world, or about liberating camps, or shooting those horrible, horrible Germans and collaborators.

I wanted to know more, so I read every fictional book available. I knew this war. I felt it was inside of me, but fictional books didn’t quite cut it. I switched to history books. I watched movies. I learned about the hunt for Eichmann. I studied what Simon Wiesenthal was doing. I read everything about the holocaust. The horrors of the elimination of Jews, gay people, Romani, mentally disabled and anyone else out of the norm. I read about Mengele and his horrible experiments. I wanted to understand. The more I learned, the less I understood. This was a war I understood, this was a war I knew all about. It was black and white. Good and evil. How did people allow for this to happen when the fictional books I had read spoke of the bravery? I wrote a story about a young girl in a camp (based a lot on Anne Frank in hindsight) who survived (alas not based on Anne Frank) while her family perished. After all I knew this war. I knew this, too.

I became more critical about my own country, the Netherlands. We were the country the most Jews got transported from, the most who never came back, even if you adjust to percentages within the population, we still were in the dishonourable position of being the lead. I learned about the collaborators from their children. I learned about the silent majority to whom “Ik heb het niet geweten” (the dutch version of “Ich habe es nicht gewusst”) really didn’t fly. You had to have known. How could you not? How could you stay silent? How could you tell on your neighbours? How could you take their belongings? Why, why, why? To my teenage mind, it all seemed so clear. You had to make the right choice. Easy. So why wasn’t it that way? I began to write more critical fictional WW2 stories. Stories about collaborators, stories about someone not daring to speak up and looking the other way over and over and over again, until finally they were liberated and could pretend none of it was their fault. This was my war. I knew it.

I read about the Soviets fight, the questionable delay of the Allied Forces invasion over and over out of fear for Stalin. The immense cost of the Russian lives, because that second front stayed away. I still burn a candle on May 9th out of solidarity for the Russian lives lost, even though in the Netherlands we commemorate the dead on May 4th. I wrote a story about the siege on Leningrad. This was my war. The more I learned, the more I knew, the more I became fascinated.

I focused on the rise of Hitler. The economic cost of WW1 to Germany, the poverty, the promises he made, the unexplainable attraction he had on crowds, the choices of the German population and the responses at first abroad. The unemployment he combatted. I knew the war, I wanted to know the start. You don’t start with concentration camps, you start with little things. I wrote about the “Kristallnacht” and the slowly excluding of Jews in everyday life. I began to understand how Hitler could’ve risen to power. I knew this war. I wrote a story about a young German Wehrmacht soldier and his choices and dilemmas.

I learned about Italy, Mussolini. How a country seen as wrong still saved a lot of his Jewish population, while we (the good guys) had not. I looked at Denmark where the Royal Family didn’t flee and exerted influence to save people, while ours had not. I looked at Switzerland and the questionable decisions of their banks with regards to the Nazi gold (which was never theirs to begin with). I learned more and more and more of this war. This war was mine. I wrote stories about robbing a Swiss bank after the war. I wrote a story where our royal family had stayed and its possible impact, including the questionable loyalties and position of then Prins Bernhard.

This was a war I knew. This was MY war. This was a war I began to understand.

Then I went to Auschwitz.

The immensity of it hit me like a ton of bricks. I felt it so profoundly that day. I still can’t think of that monument without crying.

And I realised something important.

I knew nothing.

This was not my war.

These weren’t my stories to tell.

These words belonged to other people.

“So we may never forget”.  Yes, we need to remember. Yes, we need to retell the stories of those who were there, of those people it impacted on, of those who survived and those who did not. The real stories.

I often see people say when they write fiction about WW2, “We need to tell these stories so it never happens again.”

And I say, how arrogant. How arrogant of you to think that your fiction will do what the true stories of survivors did not. How arrogant to think you can appropriate something so horrific and do it better than those who lived it. How arrogant was I.

It happened and is happening again. We were there in Srebrenica; we stood by and watched. We were there in Rwanda, we stood by another genocide and did nothing. We are there in Myanmar, we make some fleeting comment about how bad it is what they’re doing to the Rohingyas and move on with our lives. We are there with North Korea; we don’t even comment about those concentration camps, because they only concern their own population after all. Those rockets that might hit ocean are a bigger deal to us. The internet, and before that, television means we are always there and we always do nothing.

We need to remember, we need to tell the true stories. Not for our amusement. Not for our entertainment. Not for our desire for angst. Not for a cheap thrill. But so that maybe someday, we will finally open our eyes and truly see. So that maybe someday, we will finally say, “stop, no further!” So that maybe someday, we will finally learn from history. So that maybe someday, when a person like Hitler tries to take control, we will say, “not on our watch.”