The Whole Story

If there is anything I have learned from traveling, it is that I do not always have the whole story. Like before I went to Israel, I thought the Palestine/Israel issue was because of religion--Muslims vs Jews. But after talking to our tour guides and some shopkeepers, I found that that whole idea was completely flawed. There are Christians on both sides. There are Israeli Muslims who consider it a blessing to have citizenship. And there are Jews who know there were problems within the state. The issue comes from up top. The relationship between the people within the walls of the city is peaceful, and that's all they want, peace. It's the politicians who make it complicated.

Now I'm in London. One of the greatest landmark cities of the world. But my new insight did not come because I was here, strictly speaking. It actually was a result of a BBC documentary. The subject of the documentary was something I had never even heard of: The Mass Ethnic Cleansing of Germans Out of Eastern Europe. I knew that many Germans underwent persecution and were the subjects of prejudice during and after WWII. I have even visited a concentration camp in Berlin and learned how Russia used the concentration camps against former Nazis and other political dissidents.

But I never imagined the immense violence and hardship that those who spoke German went through (even if you weren't an ethnic German).

As crazy as it may seem, the ethnic cleansing in Eastern Europe rivals the Holocaust in horror. Every tactic used by Hitler's Nazis against the Jews was used against the Germans by revenge-driven residents of places like Poland, Prussia, and Czechoslovakia. One survivor told about how Stalin let the Soviet troops run lawless for 3 days as a spoil of war and how they corralled all the women to endure 24hr/day raping. Another told of barracks used to imprison German men down to the age of 6! Six years old and made to stand and sit with the group like a soldier, or else. Now you have to remember that many, if not most, Eastern Europeans did not condone this violence; but on the flip side, not all Germans agreed with Hitler either!

A German family forced from their home in Czechoslovakia.

A fourth of Germans living in Germany today are either survivors or descendants of survivors from this horrible time in history. Watching this documentary really helped me to see that there is always another side to the story. In school we focus on the help that the Americans gave to western Europe to rebuild and the Cold War that followed. At the time of the war, the iron curtain masked eastern Europe from the allies' view. But it doesn't anymore. We should be learning about these post-war horrors. To me, seeing these awful scenes of violence solidified my belief in forgiveness and unity. The retaliations were the acts of mad men, not men seeking for peace.

As we seek out learning we have to realize that we do not always have the big picture. We do not always have the right perspective. We do not always have all the information. But by learning from experiences like those mentioned, and allowing ourselves to admit we were ignorant, we can better connect with others and grow as a world-wide community.