I recently read a young adult’s book, Making Bombs for Hitler. (It was in a selection of books that Good Reading Magazine asked me to review.) It was about a nine year old girl who was taken from the Ukraine by the Nazis and sent to a labour camp. No, she wasn’t Jewish. It seems the Nazis also kidnapped young people from Poland, the Ukraine and other northern regions and sent them to be slave labour. After all, one couldn’t have any sweet Aryan child doing such dirty, dangerous work. Why, for starters, they’d expect to be paid and fed well. Why do that when you can force children to do the same work for a bowl of turnip soup a day? And, if  they get too weak, or they’re too small to do the work, you can send them to the hospital and drain their blood to give to the wounded troops on the battlefield. It didn’t matter that draining all their blood would kill them; there were plenty more where they came from.

As you can imagine, it was a harrowing read; especially knowing that although this was fiction, it was based on interviews with survivors from these camps. At first, my reaction was “Bloody Nazis! Thank God they were defeated and dealt with.” Then I thought some more. Hitler wasn’t the only megalomaniac to lead a country down the path to Hell. There was also Stalin and Pol Pot and the Ayatollah Khomeini and Idi Amin and Saddam Hussein… Then there were people like Oliver Cromwell, who liberated his country from the “dictatorship” of a king, only to become an authoritarian bully boy himself. (The man tried to get rid of Christmas!)

It seems to me that it’s always been a disaster to place too much power in the hands of one, or a few people. That’s why I prefer democracy. Yes, sometimes a genuine turkey makes his way into office, but the system is set up so that we can get rid of the turkey without one drop of blood having to be spilt. It means that the ordinary citizen gets a say in the running of the place, without having to resort to mob rule (which can be just as dangerous).

Human nature being what it is, we need checks and balances so that the worst of us can’t dominate and destroy the best of us. And, isn’t that a sad comment on the human psyche?

Back to the book… Those poor Ukrainians. Their country was over-run by Stalin so, when the Nazis kidnapped them, they were “unidentified” or were listed as “Russian”, and were treated as “political prisoners”. When the camps were liberated, many of the survivors were expatriated to the USSR, where they were labelled “Nazi sympathisers” and were either killed or sent to labour camps in Siberia. Don’t forget that these were mainly children. No wonder the majority of the Ukraine people still refuse to be annexed by Russia. (Fight the good fight, fellas!)

Was it just, that the Russians labelled these slave-camp survivors, “Nazi sympathisers”? No, of course not. It was absolutely bonkers!  But, here we are in the twenty first century, labelling all survivors of the destruction of Syria as “potential terrorists”.

When the human psyche drinks the heady mix of fear and perceived-superiority, the end result is madness. Thank God for all the little candle-holders, lifting their little lights up in the ensuing darkness. And, thank God for all the story-tellers who won’t let us forget.

Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch, Making Bombs for Hitler, Scholastic Canada (2012) and Scholastic Australia (2015)