Schindler's Wallet
As a Christmas gift, my sister and brother-in-law gave me a copy of the American Heritage History Of World War Two which I had never owned before, in spite of my long years of interest in the period of history.
What is sparking this particular note here is a table that was calculated by the corporate contractor that the Nazi German government had running the Holocaust death camps. (Yes, THAT Schindler. Him and his peers.) They had calculated the profit for an "average" inmate who was put to death after a mere nine months of slave labor. I won't reproduce it here, because I'm sure it's available on-line somewhere and I could probably come back and link it if I want.
I decided to interpolate the data in the table to the here and now. First, I found a site that had foreign exchange rate data, which told me how much a ReichsMark was worth in Dollars before hostilities broke with America. Then, I found another site to give me inflation figures for the last seventy years.
Care to guess? How much was a human life worth to Mr. Schindler and his kind?
$45.50 in 2012 money. Less than most of my friends pay for their TV programming per month, I imagine. About a week's worth of groceries for my household.
Would you kill somebody for $45.50? How many people on this world now would answer "Yes" to that question? The only way to guarantee that everybody answer "No" is to raise everybody's standard of living to the level that a human life is more than that figure. It is too cheap in too many places for us to say "Never Again" and mean it.
What is sparking this particular note here is a table that was calculated by the corporate contractor that the Nazi German government had running the Holocaust death camps. (Yes, THAT Schindler. Him and his peers.) They had calculated the profit for an "average" inmate who was put to death after a mere nine months of slave labor. I won't reproduce it here, because I'm sure it's available on-line somewhere and I could probably come back and link it if I want.
I decided to interpolate the data in the table to the here and now. First, I found a site that had foreign exchange rate data, which told me how much a ReichsMark was worth in Dollars before hostilities broke with America. Then, I found another site to give me inflation figures for the last seventy years.
Care to guess? How much was a human life worth to Mr. Schindler and his kind?
$45.50 in 2012 money. Less than most of my friends pay for their TV programming per month, I imagine. About a week's worth of groceries for my household.
Would you kill somebody for $45.50? How many people on this world now would answer "Yes" to that question? The only way to guarantee that everybody answer "No" is to raise everybody's standard of living to the level that a human life is more than that figure. It is too cheap in too many places for us to say "Never Again" and mean it.