Just doing my job.
I can feel noticeable nervousness in the air already, which made me get up earlier than usual today. This feeling takes me back to 1991, June. I was 12 then and we got a call from grandma (nun) from Primorska to Maribor that there are tanks at the border crossing with Italy. Of course we all, dad leading, first denied it completely, literally. Probably grandma mixed something up, she's old, maybe they just have armed exercises etc. We were in denial, it seemed too unbelievable to be true, until we heard on the news that we were actually at war. I wasn't able to grasp the full reality and process all the information happening around me back then, because it happened too fast and I was too young. But I remember that feeling and today's feeling is eerily similar to that from 1991. Some faces are the same too.
Over morning coffee I watched an interesting vlog on the topic "just doing my job" and decided to add my own pot to the same topic. At least partly because yesterday I got comments that I'm doing "unicorn" topics (#nobenezamere). So today something a bit more tangible, local, current. Something I hope isn't so abstract and will be easier to understand. Obviously it's clear to all of us that we're in the new fashion trend "just doing my job", "my superior ordered me so" and "that's the instructions we got". We all probably know what I'm talking about.
These excuses, because I can't and don't want to call them anything else, pulled me into an apparently unrelated event, on vacation two years ago. Over morning coffee, on the terrace, to the sound of seagulls, I was browsing the internet and came across photographer Marina Amaral's project from 2018, the Faces of Auswitz. The digital colorist decided to colorize photos of people who died in the Auswitz Birkenau camp and pay tribute to the memory of the dead with this gesture. Her most resonant photo is of 14-year-old Polish girl named Czesława Kwoka, taken just hours before her death (below).
I'm not particularly interested in history, but then something drew me in. The look of that girl shocked me, still does. A few more clicks led me through websites describing the horrors that happened about 75 years ago and which I won't describe in detail because I don't want to ruin your Saturday morning. I'll just touch on the most common excuses (answers) that Nazis gave at the Nuremberg trial. You won't believe it, or maybe you will, but the most common answers were: "just following orders", "my superior ordered me so" and "I was doing my job".
The story of WWII turns around at the end of the war, when the mass psychosis of the then regime dissipated and the main executors were brought to trial in Nuremberg. I don't have all the data on what happened to them then, but I assume they weren't spared. What shocked me most is the fact that these people were firmly convinced throughout the whole period that there was nothing wrong with what they were doing. That's the part of the story that shakes me the most, literally shocks me and leaves me speechless.
If you've ever come across German healer Bruno Groening by chance or on purpose, you know that among his "patients" there were many who were brainwashed by the then regime and just followed orders. Sick, tired and traumatized. One of the soldiers who worked in the camp during the war said with tears in his eyes: "...we were young and did what we were ordered, after the war we were left alone with our demons.".
Dear friends, this psychosis will dissipate one day too, believe me it will. I don't know if I'll live to see it, but one day it will all end. Then those of you who today just do your job and follow orders will have to continue living with these same people and above all survive with yourselves, which believe me will be the harder part of the task. The people who give you orders today, which you follow, won't be there then to defend you. You'll be left to yourselves and your demons.