DISQUS

Jon Hanna POW camps were certainly very different to concentration camps, and those holding POWs of some nationalities where different to those holding others (Russians were treated worse than Westerners as you say, the same goes for the Poles). For that matter concentration camps differed considerably, from each other and at different periods during the war - a concentration camp is strictly just a place where a large number of civilians are held (the Manzanar in California was a concentration camp where the Americans held Japanese and Japanese America civilians) that doesn't entail mistreatment. Of course, it is hard today to hear the word and not immediately think of the horrors of the German concentration camps. Those camps like Auschwitz 2 where worse again and should more properly be called death camps or extermination camps, as mass murder was more actively pursued there.

These comparisons in themselves become unspeakable though. We can say Auschwitz 2 was worse than Auschwitz 1 was worse than Stalag Luft IV (a POW camp where American, British and Canadian POWs where held where conditions where initially relatively good but they deteriorated to the level of atrocity, including the infamous "death march" when Germany prepared to retreat from the area). At the same time, the suffering of some in the "better" camps was so great that comparisons can never really get at the truth.

That Messiaen was in relatively good conditions was a prerequisite of his being able to compose and perform at all, but this "relatively good" was not necessarily even as good as International Law demands a POW camp be. It is true also as the piece says that "even from the concentration camps we have poetry, we have music, we have visual art". We also have work created afterwards by survivors, Nussbaum's paintings created when he was in hiding. Half a century later, one thing this still manages to do is to pass by the mind-reeling algebra of comparing horrors to the fact that each of those suffering, no matter how great or lesser it may be in comparison, was a human, housing the creative impulse that is in all of us whether or not we have the particular talents and relative fortune needed to leave a legacy like Messiaen's.

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