Last week, while representing IJM Canada in Winnipeg, I had the opportunity to visit the Canadian Museum for Human Rights for a second time. Since I had toured the museum previously, I wasn’t as awestruck by the architecture as I had been on my first visit, although I still made the long climb up to the Tower of Hope.
Many of the exhibits were familiar, but on the fourth level in the “Breaking the Silence” gallery, I was introduced to Armin Wegner, a witness to the Armenian Genocide of 1915-1923. Wegner was a conscientious objector during World War I who enlisted in the German medical corps to avoid conscription into a combat unit. After serving on the Eastern Front during the war between Germany and Russia, he was transferred to Turkey. There, as part of the retinue of German Field Marshal von der Goltz, he travelled toward Baghdad and began to encounter Armenian refugees.
Turkey, which had entered the war on the side of Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was concerned that the Christian Armenian population would side with Russia. Volunteer battalions of Armenians had already helped the Russians fight against the Turks in the Caucasus region. These events, and historical suspicion of the Armenian people, led the Turkish government to order the mass deportation of the country’s Armenian population. Hundreds of thousands of Armenians were marched into the Syrian desert without food and water, while other Armenian communities throughout Turkey were massacred. As many as 1.5 million Armenians were killed, making this the greatest atrocity of World War I.
As he travelled along the Baghdad Railway, Wegner saw the Ottoman army driving Armenians on forced marches through the desert and encountered scenes of starvation, disease and murder. Deliberately disobeying orders meant to prevent news of the massacres from spreading but unable to remain a bystander, Wegner collected evidence of the genocide – including photographs, documents, and personal notes – to smuggle out to contacts in Germany and the United States. Wegner was conscious of the potential consequences of his actions: he wrote: “I have taken numerous photographs during the past few days. I was told that Jemal Pasha, the hangman of Syria, imposed the death penalty on anyone violating the prohibition on photography inside the [Armenian] refugee camps. I carried these images of horror and accusation rolled into a bundle against my stomach … I have no doubt that I am committing high treason, but I am conscious that perhaps I have been able to assist these poor people even a little.”
Eventually Wegner was arrested for censorship violations and sent back to Germany. But he continued to advocate for Armenians after the war; at the Paris Peace Conference he lobbied President Woodrow Wilson of the United States to support the creation of a sovereign Armenian state. And he refused to remain silent as the makings of another genocide began to emerge in Germany. In 1933 Wegner bravely wrote an open letter to Hitler protesting the state-organised boycott of German Jews. He was arrested by the Gestapo, imprisoned and tortured. Released in 1934, he fled to England and then to Italy where he lived the rest of his life in self-imposed exile.
When I “face” injustice rather than looking away, I am confronted by my shared humanity with the other person.
As someone who wants to be known as a justice-seeker, wants to be known as a person who does the right thing, Armin Wegner’s story inspires and challenges me. You see, I believe that justice begins by choosing not to look away, and Wegner did not look away even though he understood the potential consequences of his actions. When we choose not to look away, an obligation forms. When I “face” injustice rather than looking away, I am confronted by my shared humanity with the other person. The person I see becomes my neighbour precisely through the way their face summons me, calls for me, reaches out to me, and in so doing reminds me of my responsibility to that person, and calls my behaviour into question. What will I do? What will I say? How will I respond?
There are many situations in our world where it would be easier just to look away because they are extremely perplexing and very disturbing—the European migration crisis, gang-related violence in Central America so pervasive that it causes asylum-seekers to flood into the U.S., child sexual abuse that has become a family business in the Philippines. Yet solving these crises is so far outside of our scope of capability and influence that perhaps the best and only way to not look away and instead face the injustice is to make a financial contribution to an organization that is responding directly, such as World Vision or International Justice Mission. But it’s much harder to discharge our sense of responsibility by making a gift when the face that summons me is that of an elderly disabled neighbour looking for conversation or a young woman looking to find a way to escape an abusive boyfriend.
There is a cost to not looking away, as Armin Wegner realized. “A witness is a very difficult task”, he said. “I could nevermore forget what I have seen.” His son says he cried out in his sleep until his very last day, “dreaming over and over again about the tragedies he witnessed and those he endured.” Caring enough to not look away should not be regarded casually, but engaged in with mindfulness of one’s own well-being and knowledge of good self-care practices. Cynda Rushton, professor of clinical ethics and nursing and pediatrics at Johns Hopkins University (quoted in the Psychology Today article “The High Cost of Caring“) says “There is always a risk when we care, because caring means to suffer with someone. But we have to be mindful of our own capacities, needs, and limits. We need to care for ourselves so we can care for others.”
There is a cost to caring, but there is greater cost to not caring—the diminishment of our humanness and the further degradation of the world as a just society.
There is a cost to caring, but there is greater cost to not caring—the diminishment of our humanness and the further degradation of the world as a just society. As Richard Bell writes in Rethinking Justice, “Justice is not simply found in the rule of law but in human social and moral practices that create a civil society, where all people have equal claim to human dignity and accept responsibility for the well-being of all its citizens.” Caring enough not to look away when my neighbour is in need does help make the world a better place.
Armin Wegner is a 20th century hero the world has largely forgotten, and I might never have known if it were not for the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. On his tomb in Positano, Italy are written the words: “I have loved justice and hated iniquity: that is why I die in exile.”
Banner photo by Robert Lindsell. Some rights reserved.
