-> continued from above
Like follow-blogger @RuthRandom I love researching the origin of words, tracing how they shapeshift and carry residues of older manifestations. A quick look on-line under greet brought surprising demarcations, spanning from ‘to come into contact with’ in the sense of ‘attack, accost’ as well as ‘salute, welcome’ and ‘touch, take hold of, handle’ to ‘weep, bewail’. At the initial point of contact between … a decision is made which way you go, with or against. I wonder if children who grew up with the Hitler salute still ‘felt’ the gesture at the root of their arm with every Guten Tag after war and Third Reich had ended, as an impulse, a small twitch, and how long it took them to unlearn it, physically, mentally.
I can’t consider this gesture on its own. It is an emblem of a tightly controlled and closed system, in which those who are ‘in’ recognise and affirm not only each other but also the regime they live under, and those who are ‘out’, actively, aggressively excluded (from 1934 on people of Jewish origin were forbidden to do the salute), are deprived of their civil rights and in the end their lives.
Looking through at a book about WWII I came across images of Jewish men, women and children with arms raised in a very different, terror-laden gesture. The photographs were taken May 1943, when German soldiers and SS quelled the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto, turning the ghetto to rubble, and killing as many as possible. Warsaw Ghetto at one stage held 400.000 people. At least 300.000 were murdered over the years.
This is an iconic image (I give you the link as I don’t know if it’s against copyright to use a photo found on Wikipedia): an SS-officer points his gun at a group of adults and children emerging from a building. More soldiers stand nearby. The civilians look exhausted, terrified. The boy in the front, in coat, cap and short trousers, holds his hands up, as do the other children. The fear in his face.
The joyful elated raising of the right arm of those who sided with power versus the abject gesture of those who did not count in any way at all.
I wrap myself in shadows.
