The cattle cars are waiting, but are we cattle? (The deeper question)

Etty Hillesum (1943, Westerbork): "Whenever misfortune strikes, people have a natural instinct to lend a helping hand and to save what can be saved. Tonight I shall be helping to dress babies and to calm mothers - and that is all I can hope to do. I could curse myself for that. For we all know that we are yielding up our sick and defenseless brothers and sisters to hunger, heat, cold, exposure, and destruction, and yet we dress them and escort them to the bare cattle cars - and if they can't walk, we carry them on stretchers. What is going on, what mysteries are these, in what sort of fatal mechanism have we become enmeshed? The answer cannot simply be that we are all cowards. We're not that bad. We stand before a much deeper question . . ."

The ellipses are Etty's. She comes to the end of her reflection and falls mute. She worked for the Dutch Jewish Council and as a volunteer at the Westerbork transit camp, where Jews were herded and housed in hellish barracks until they found themselves on the list for transport (via cattle rail cars) to the death camps. Etty's job was to make life as bearable as possible under hellish circumstances: overcrowding, starvation, cold, disease, fleas and endless indignities, as everything was taken from them, including hope, while they waited to be carried away.

There is nothing that I can imagine that is quite as horrible as the systematic extermination of millions of Jews by Germany during WW2 and how they went about it. They used the Jews to help them process their own neighbors and even their own families for extermination! Because, well, as Etty explains, there was no stemming the evil, it was so total and overwhelming and, as if inevitable, that she felt that, given her constitution (she wasn't a revolutionary or a spy by nature, but her heart bled for her fellow Jews [friends, neighbors and family], that she could do worse than stay with them, knowing that she herself would soon be riding a cattle car to Auschwitz. But in the meantime she would stay in Westerbork and do whatever she could to make folks comfortable.

Genocide is not new and humans are ingenious at devising more and more efficient ways of killing each other off. The nuclear bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima remains in a class all its own in terms of single acts of violence and terror perpetrated on a people by a conquering nation. (On a scale of 1-10, Hiroshima and Nagasaki rank 11.) But right now I am somewhere else.

I am thinking of Climate Change. And how I feel like Etty, in Westerbork, working in the shadow of certain doom, to make life as easy as possible until the cattle car is ready to fill. Even though the circumstances are different, the mystery she refers to, that stumps her, is the same. "What is going on, what mysteries are these, in what sort of fatal mechanism have we become enmeshed? The answer cannot simply be that we are all cowards. We're not that bad. We stand before a much deeper question . . ."

We get wind of what awaits us at the end of the line. We hear about animals going extinct all the time and of what Joanna Macy called "the Great Unravelling". Underneath all of the distractions of life and the headlines vying for our attention are all the signs of things passing various points of no return. But we keep going, day after day, pretty much accepting our fate, almost smoothing the way for the worst among us to keep serving the "fatal mechanism". We aren't ourselves the evil ("we aren't that bad"), but we are "enmeshed in it".

It takes someone like Etty to hold up that mirror for us, so we can take a hard look at ourselves.

The cattle cars of Climate Change are waiting, but it is time to ask ourselves, " . . But are we cattle?"

Etty Hillesum, 1914 - 1943, died in Auschwitz