Children in War Make No Sense

The question asked, ‘why did I chose this image to be my face on Facebook’?

Why this image?

The  American war ship didn’t move.  She sat still in the tropical ocean – barely breathing.  Still as the child swaddled on her deck; terrifyingly small, the abuse of four years of captivity on display – her first 4 years on this earth.

They told the American captain just how close she was to dying.  War teaches deep lessons quickly.  The American captain would have also known that to make it this far, she was a survivor.

I imaging the him, just months after years of war, looking at that tiny baby girl.  Death would have been well known to him.  Bad death would have draped his nights like wet sheets, endlessly denying sleep and comfort.

But starvation, that is not a normal death.  And children in war makes no sense.

He stopped the ship, in the middle of the ocean, hoping the calm would give that little girl a chance; keep the fight alive.  Perhaps saving himself.  Understanding that compassion, love, and charity work as armor against the despair long war leaves on the soul.

Because by now – by now – he and the world knew the enormity of what they faced and what that little body had been through.

Hate stuffed that baby girl behind a wall and into a box of squalor and sickness and abuse and such deep, unrelenting hunger that no living thing moved without being eaten – animal or plant.

It was the only world she knew until a ship from America showed up.

And that, the American captain knew as well.

Why that image?

Monsters.

We said we’d never forget the monsters.

Today, the same chain of command that we see ‘blitzing’ into the streets to terrorize folks is also holding over 75,000 people in over 200 concentration camp sites.  (And yes, that is the correct word.)  

The parallels to the opening moves of the Nazi’s is far to close to be accidental.

The same chain of command, far from being proud of their immigration system, is working very hard at hiding what they are doing with those they hold.

Monsters hide their captors – that is how children with those faces are made.  

Why that picture?

We said we’d never forget and history has ‘blessed’ us with a face that demands we never fucking forget.

The America I joined was not made for monsters.

The America I joined stopped a war ship in the middle of an ocean so that a little girl could live and become my mother.

From Google AI:

“The original black-and-white picture was taken in December 1942 by Wilhelm Brasse, a fellow prisoner forced to work as a photographer in the camp. Brasse remembered Czesława vividly, noting that she was terrified and had been brutally beaten by a female guard (Kapo) just moments before the photo was taken because she did not understand German. The cut on her lip and the bruise are visible in the photograph.”

Indonesian Concentration Camps for Women (World War 2) where my mother was:  “These “vrouwenkampen” (women’s camps) were characterized by extreme, systematic deprivation,, forced labor, and high mortality rates, leading many survivors and historians to describe them as concentration or “passive extermination” camps.