In Gaza and Beirut, the echoes of a tragic past

I had seen other children like her before, but, this time, I shuddered for reasons I would explain in a moment. But before doing so, I will say that this potential world-class acrobat in global stadiums catching attention in competitive sports was most likely going to become something hideously and totally different: The easiest prey for male perversity with the complicity of her invisible patrons, and before anyone can say “Watch out, kid!”, land up in some sleazy hole, lined up for an abortion.

The lights changed to green, and engines purred and moved on. And Kalyani went back to her perch, the smile gone. This was New Delhi. This was me. This was Business as Usual.

It has been so with us in India that is Bharat. It has been so since forever. We are sanctimonious, sententious and — I say this with self-disgust, for I am all of this myself — screamingly self-centred. We care not a jot. Full stop.

If that was not so, would we not take time off from worshipping, as we must, Ram Lalla and Krishna Kanhaiya, to see, to note, and to rage against the result of two years of the Ukraine war and its impact on children? To quote a UNICEF document: “Despite their resilience, for many children inside and outside Ukraine the war has wiped out two years of schooling, playtime with friends, and moments spent with loved ones, robbing them of their education and happiness, wreaking havoc on their mental state.” And rage at the fact that “at least 545 children have been killed — the equivalent of a child dying every day since the war escalated, mostly from bombardment. At least 1,156 children have been injured.”

Following the horrendous October 7, 2023 attack by Hamas, through which that terror organisation placed communities and whole nations around the world in jeopardy, and (according to local, by which I mean war zone, agencies) “at least 16,480 Palestinian children have been killed in Israeli attacks in the Gaza Strip, since last October 7, the victims including 115 babies, 35 Palestinian children have died from malnutrition and dehydration amid a tight Israeli blockade on the enclave. And at least 3,500 children in Gaza are facing the risk of death amid a lack of food and malnutrition under Israeli restrictions on the delivery of food into Gaza”. In another telling statistic, we learn that “more than 17,000 children have lost their parents or at least one of them after they were brutally killed by Israeli occupation forces.”

Have I already lost the attention of my reader? Perhaps. I have because I know myself. Unable to face bitter truths, I let them lull me into a comfortable daze especially when they come in numbers.

So let me move from today’s traumatic truths and numbers to 1942. And to none other than to Rabindranath Tagore, Gurudeva to us, the only one of his kind. We sing the song he wrote as our anthem, not always quickening to its deeper message. And most of us know of the collection of his great songs in the Gitanjali, that he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913 — the first Asian so to do — and returned the Knighthood that Britain had conferred on him after the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of 1919. But may I invite the reader to a work of his that is lesser known than it should be but has never left my heart since it entered it (when I was eight or nine years old)? I refer to the short play, Dak Ghar, written by Tagore in 1912, and first published in 1914 in English as The Post Office. A child, Amal, is the play’s little hero, its tragic and yet sublimating hero. I will detain no one with excerpts from that work of sheer pathos but will say something that happened around it in 1942.

A Polish polymath, Henryk Goldszmit, was also a teacher and a doctor for children. Better known as Janusz Korczak, he headed a Jewish orphanage in Warsaw. Yes, Israel may please note, an orphanage that was predominantly, if not wholly, for parentless Jewish children. As Adolf Hitler’s war swelled from horror to Holocaust, the orphanage had to move and had to swell, too, in numbers and in gloom. The phenomenally learned Korczak decided to do something different, something new, to keep the children under his care from falling prey to depression and fear, from losing all hope.

He decided to stage Tagore’s play, The Post Office, in a Polish version, I believe adapted from the German one, with the children in his care playing the ten character roles in the play. He had done this kind of thing before, in Warsaw, with the orphan actors using old bed sheets and clothes for costumes. But this time, it was different. The skeletal hand of imminent death hung over the teacher and the students, the director and his actors. Not much after the play was performed, its truth imbibed by the little players, Korczak and all the children were transported to the concentration camps of Treblinka, 50 miles northeast of Warsaw, never to be seen again.

It has been said of Treblinka that it was “among the most notorious of the extermination camps in the vast, almost incomprehensible, labour and death camp universe created by the Nazi regime”. That the Jewish children who acted in the play and its director “…all went to their death in Treblinka and disappeared without a trace” is something we, inheritors of Tagore’s legacy, must tell today’s unleashers of bombardments. They were Jewish, those children. They could have belonged to any faith or none. The basic fact is they were children.

Diplomacy has its compulsions, Indian diplomacy no less. That is realpolitik. But humanity has its compulsions, Indian humanity has no less about real-life, real death. Tagore and Korczak speak out today, whoever else does or not, from the depths of India’s soul and Poland’s. They say: “For God’s sake, for Yahweh’s sake and Allah’s, for Ishvar’s, Ramlalla’s and Krishna Kanhaiya’s, if you know what motherhood and childhood are, halt, halt, whatever and all that leads to the murder of innocents carried out in the name of whatever…sovereignty, territory, which are nothing but vainglory and self-lust.”

And, totally unaware of the children who went to their deaths in Treblinka, but aware of childhood, Kalyani may be imagined to say from her cartwheeling perch, in the words of Sudha at Dak Ghar’s end, which is also Amal’s end, “Tell him Sudha has not forgotten him.” The “him” there including all the hims and hers in the children killed, maimed and orphaned in Ukraine and Gaza.

So apt, therefore, that Prime Minister Narendra Modi in his discussions on Friday with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz should raise the need to end the Ukraine and Gaza conflicts. And so fitting that his honoured guest (who agreed wholly with him), should be head today of the nation that Hitler, once upon a hateful time, headed.

Gopalkrishna Gandhi, a former administrator,is a student of modern Indian history.The views expressed are personal

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