Since Drazena fails to fit this picture I have become aware that something deeper is happening to me, that I am witnessing a more serious process: the creation of a prejudice within me towards these people, something that should be called ‘a yellow certificate syndrome’. What I am starting to do is to reduce a real, physical individual to an abstract ‘they’ – that is, to a common denominator of refugees, owners of the yellow certificate. From there to second-class citizen – or rather, non-citizen – who owns nothing and has no rights, is only a thin blue line. I can also see how easy it is to slip into this prejudice as into a familiar pair of warm slippers, ready and waiting for me at home. And even if I don’t like to recognize it in myself, I obviously do believe that there is a line dividing us, a real difference – never mind if it is not me who is defining that line, setting the rules, excluding them. Or is it? Once excluded, they become aliens. Not-me. Not-us. You still feel responsible, but in a different way, as towards beggars. You can pity, but you don’t have to give. With this exclusion the feeling of human solidarity turns into an issue of my personal ethics. That is, once people are reduced to the category of the ‘other’ – or ‘otherness’ – you are no longer obliged to do something for their sake, but for yourself only, for the benefit of your own soul.
Perhaps what I am also witnessing is a mechanism of self-defence as if there were a limit to how much brutality, pain or suffering one is able to take on board and feel responsible for. Over and above this, we are often confronted with more or less abstract entities, numbers, groups, categories of people, facts – but not names, not faces. To deal with pain on such a scale is in a way much easier than to deal with individuals. With a person you know you have to do something, act, give food, shelter, money, take care. On the other hand, one person could certainly not be expected to take care of a whole mass of people. For them, there has to be someone else: the state, a church, the Red Cross, Caritas, an institution. The moment one delegates personal responsibility to the institution, the war becomes more normal, orderly, and therefore more bearable. The person not only relieves himself or herself of responsibility, but also of a feeling of guilt too: the problem is still there, but it is no longer mine. Yes, of course I’ll pay the extra war-tax, I’ll gladly give away clothing or food to Caritas or any responsible organization, instead of to the suspicious-looking individuals ringing the doorbell claiming that they are refugees. Because what if they are not real refugees – your help might get into the ‘wrong’ hands and you’ll never earn that place in heaven that you’d promised yourself at the outset. The moment I thought Drazena ought not wear make-up or patent high-heeled shoes was the very moment when I myself pushed her into the group ‘refugee’, because it was easier for me. But the fact that she didn’t fit the cliche, that she disappointed me by trying to keep her face together with her make-up and her life together with a pair of shoes, made me aware of my own collaboration with this war.
Now I think I understand what I couldn’t understand before: how it happened that people who lived near German concentration camps didn’t do anything, didn’t help. In Claude Lanzmann’s long documentary on the Holocaust, Shoah, there is a scene of dialogue with one of the survivors from Chelmno, the place in Poland where Jews were first exterminated by gas, 400,000 of them.
‘It was always this peaceful here. Always. Even when they were burning 2000 people – Jews – every day, it was just as peaceful. No one protested. Everyone went about his work. It was silent. Peaceful. Just as it is now,’ he said.
And the survivor from Treblinka said: ‘We were in the wagon; the wagon was rolling eastwards. A funny thing happened, maybe it’s not nice to say it. Most of the people, not just the majority, but ninety-nine per cent of the Polish people when they saw the train going through… they were laughing, they were joyful because the Jewish people were being taken away.’
The third voice I remember is of a woman who lived through the war in hiding: ‘I remember the day when they made Berlin Judenrein. People hurried along the streets; no one wanted to be in the streets; you could see the streets were absolutely empty. They didn’t want to look, you know. They hastened to buy what they had to buy – they had to buy something for the Sunday, you see. So they went shopping, then hurried back to their houses. And I remember this day very vividly because we saw police cars rushing through the streets of Berlin taking people out of the houses.’
But maybe the best explanation as to why people didn’t stop the massacre is given by a Polish villager from present-day Treblinka who, in answer to the question whether they were afraid for the Jews, answered that if he cut his finger it hurt him, not the other person. Yes, they knew about the Jews, the convoys, the fact that they were taken into the camp and vanished. Poles worked their land right next to the barbed wire and heard awful screams. ‘At first it was unbearable. Then you got used to it,’ said yet another villager, a Pole. They were Jew’s, others, not-us. What had a Pole to do with the fact that Germans were killing Jews?
So we all get used to it. I understand now that nothing but this ‘otherness’ killed Jews, and it began with naming them, by reducing them to the other. Then everything became possible, even the worst atrocities like concentration camps or the slaughtering of civilians in Croatia or Bosnia. For Serbians, as for Germans, they are all others, not-us. For me, those others are refugees. For Europe, the ‘other’ is the lawless ‘Balkans’ they pretend not to understand. For the USA it’s more or less a ‘European problem’: why should they bother with the screams of thousands of people being bombed or simply dying of hunger, when those screams can hardly be heard? Let Europe do something, aren’t they working the land next to the barbed wire?
I don’t think our responsibility is the same – and I am not trying to equate the victims with those who murdered them in cold blood – all I’m saying is that it exists, this complicity: that out of opportunism and fear we all are becoming collaborators or accomplices in the perpetuation of war. For by closing our eyes, by continuing our shopping, by working our land, by pretending that nothing is happening, by thinking it is not our problem, we are betraying those ‘others’ – and I don’t know if there is a way out of it. What we fail to realize is that by such divisions we deceive ourselves too, exposing ourselves to the same possibility of becoming the ‘others’ in a different situation.
The last time I saw Drazena she told me she was okay. She is staying in a friend’s apartment until the autumn and free-lancing for a local newspaper. Afterwards she will manage to find something else. She also told me that she is writing a war diary since that is the only way she can attempt to understand what is happening to her. ‘And what I find most difficult to comprehend is the fact that there is a war going on,’ she said. ‘I still don’t understand it. It’s not that I expect a miracle to end this nightmare immediately. No, no. I mean, it is just hard for me to grasp that what is going on is the war. Do you know what a war is?’ she asked, but I could tell from her look that she didn’t really expect an answer.