I remember when I first read about the Holocaust. I was about 12 years old, and had never learned about it in school.
I couldn't believe it; the savagery was too much to comprehend. So I went to the library and read all I could. But in the mid fifties, there just wasn't much to be had. It was only when I went to college that I was able to learn more: about Kristallnacht, about the Nazis, and about the extermination camps. I spent a lot of time putting it all together. I read about the night of the "long knives," who had funded Hitler, and the failed assignation attempt. I thought if I studied it enough, I could come to terms with what had happened. I could fit it in.
But I was never able to. And when I read Joseph Conrad's “Heart of Darkness,” I thought I knew what "the horror" really meant. The undefinable and the inexpressible.
Watching and listening to the genocide in Gaza brought me all the way back to that 12 year old student. How could human beings kill 5,000 children in a month? How could Israel send millions fleeing without any place to go? And how could the hospitals, the ambulances and the schools be targeted?
How could my country pay for and protect a government in Israel that is as racist and bloodthirsty as the SS? How could the country I had served in the military be the ultimate cause of all that "horror"?
Fred Nagel
Joseph Conrad's “Heart of Darkness,”
