Waiting to Be Arrested at Night |
|
8 January 2024 - Adetswil
Walking through Heidelberg yesterday along the Neckar we passed an open plaza with a small monument. The momument was written in the Hebrew alphabet (which I don't really know) and Deutsch and indicated that a synagogue had once stood there until it was destroyed in the 1930s. On the wall of an adjacent building was a list of names of Jews who were murdered or sent to concentration camps from Heidelberg. Seeing the list I could not help but think of the book I had just finished, Tahir Hamut Izgil's Waiting to Be Arrested at Night. In it he gives a very personal account of the Uyghur genocide going on in China. The communist Chinese officials that carry blue binders with all the personal information of people who live in a building. How there's another offical for every office building with information on all the workers. The Han Chinese started to see Uyghurs as potential terrorists because of their Muslim faith and different complexion. First they came for a few of the Uyghurs. Then the Chinese started building concentration camps for the Uyghurs to "study" in. "Re-education" is the euphamism communists love. Uyghur shop owners were forced to wear armbands identifying them and could be summoned to march around town by communist officals at a moments notice. Some Uyghurs befriended the police in hopes of being spared which sowed distrust in the community. Muslim books were confiscated and destroyed, with anyone caught keeping them sent off to "study". Izgil doesn't mince words about the bloody torture chambers in these places. As more and more of the Uyghurs are rounded up and sent to camps, their neighborhoods are refilled with resettled Han Chinese. The Uyghurs are a minority, so people can pretend they were just a few seperatists when they are gone. Izgil was not eyewitness to the mass sterilizations so they do not figure in his book, but he did see children seperated from their parents to be taught just in Chinese as the Uyghur language itself was criminalized with book bans. Izgil escaped with his family just in time to the USA. He is effectively cut off from his homeland because anyone he contacts in China will be rounded up by the police and sent to "study", much like the letters of Address Unknown do in Nazi Germany. Standing there on the site of that razed synagogue in Heidelberg I wondered if humanity has learned anything in the past 100 years. Certainly the surveillence of the Chinese communist state is far more advanced than anything the Nazis could ever imagine, with ID scanners on buildings and to move between places, central databases to record the most minute details of people lives to use against them, and social credit scoring that can lock the disobedient out of society. During Covid I heard people praise China's handling of the pandemic, but I would not want to be locked in my building to starve because some official decided it was in the state's best interest. As we walked away from the plaza I heard someone say "well look what they're doing to the Palestinians in Gaza" and hung my head knowing that the idea of race crime - "us" the ingroup deserve to be treated morally and "them" the outgroup don't - is alive and well. Hopefully Izgil's book will remind some of humanity where that leads.
