For the man who has everything

Let’s be clear here. Like the Jews, my race was also the victim of genocide during WWII. So, when I heard about the theft of the Auschwitz sign — amid all the sighs and tirades on the intertubes — my first thought was not that it was a racist attack per se, but that it was stolen on behalf of a collector.

Let’s backtrack a little. What you may not know is that Auschwitz is monitored by closed-circuit cameras, sensors, lights, guards and what have you. In fact, it has quite a significant outlay of security equipment, considering that it doesn’t house any people or hold any economic benefit. Yes, I know that sounds callous, but I just want to set a comparison to the kind of stuff humans normally do expend security dollars on. The bottom line is, there is quite a bit of security around Auschwitz, a lot more than you probably think, and it’s beyond the ability of your average gang of racist thugs to get in there and actually manage to touch any building much less do anything to it.

So, when I heard that the sign above the Auschwitz camp had been stolen rather than defaced, and factored in the effort involved in order to execute the theft, I had to wonder why. And it appeared obvious to me that, rather than being some kind of heinous racial attack (as was intimated), it was just going to end up as an albeit gruesome souvenir in someone’s private collection.

I came to this conclusion because I put myself in the thief’s shoes. If there was a Japanese concentration camp that had such a famous sign above it, who would I need to be to steal it? If I was arrogant, emotionally detached, filthy rich and morbidly interested in WWII atrocities enough, would I want that sign? And the answer is, of course! You can rant and rail about the morals of someone like that, but people collect the darndest things.

Worse than anything perpetrated by the Germans during the War was what the Japanese perpetrated against the Chinese. Not only the Nanjing Massacre, which the United Human Rights Council described as “the single worst atrocity during the World War Two era in either the European or Pacific theatres of war”, but also Unit 731, a Japanese experimental camp that systematically brutalised thousands of civilians in an effort to discover the perfect biological weapon. (You’ll be pleased to know that, as the nation who led the world in constructing an architecture to keep the peace, as a country who believes that the lives of their children and grandchildren will be better if other people’s children and grandchildren can live in freedom and prosperity — I think that’s what Barack Obama said at some small prize-giving ceremony in Oslo recently — the “scientists that were involved in [Unit 731] crimes were given amnesty by the USA in exchange for [their] experimental data.”)

Do you think there are bricks from the notorious unit that have been sold off to some callous human magpie somewhere? Or perhaps other memorabilia? Well, we’ll never really know because they were only Asians so who cares, right? But, getting back to Europe and strangely morbid people detached from reality, I could easily imagine someone looking at a 5-metre hole in their gallery and wondering how to fill it. The latest news is that a British collector outsourced the duty to a Swedish neo-Nazi group who hired a Polish gang to steal the sign. Unfortunately, the thieves were rumbled a day later by a member of the Swedish neo-Nazi group itself. Strange, no? Unlesss, maybe, you were the Swedish government who decided that the best way to monitor an undesirable group was to infiltrate it, and one of your moles stumbled across the plot and was quick to blow the whistle…?

Meanwhile, Israel is braying for battle against whatever party stole the sign, so I’m expecting a “true declaration of war” against Poland, Sweden and Britain pretty soon. Bring popcorn.