Branded
by the Pink Triangle by Ken Setterington tells the story of the Nazi
persecution of gay men. Setterington weaves survivors' stories in a
chronological history wherein they told about, at first, the harassment they
suffered at clubs and bars, to the eventual deportation to concentration camps
where all gay men had to wear a pink fabric triangle sewn onto their striped
uniform. Branded also deals with the atrocities committed against gay
men and the horrific conditions they endured in the concentration camps.
This book had been classified by Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in
Publication as juvenile literature. I cannot disagree more with such a
classification. In fact, my own library system has six copies of this book, and
they are in the adult collection.
I
raise a very weighty topic when I argue when is the appropriate time to tell
children about the atrocities committed by the Nazis against Jews and gays.
Without question, this history cannot be denied and must continue to be told. My
reservation is that Setterington has ostensibly written a book for children yet
the content within is so graphic I cannot imagine any child reading this on his
own and not feeling wholly traumatized afterward. The cover, font size and
plentiful illustrations all point to a junior format of a book. In fact, all
five of Setterington's other books owned by the Mississauga Library System have
been placed in the Children's Department, so I do not feel as
if Branded was an exception, but rather that Setterington fully
intended for children to read this. However I do wonder about the five pages of
endnotes, and why they were in a work of juvenile nonfiction, and thus why
Library and Archives Canada felt to classify it as such.
The
target audience for such a book is likely not children in general, but rather
children of gay fathers. Setterington described Berlin nightlife before the
National Socialists came to power, when it was an exciting place for gays to be
out and socialize. I found the description of the goings-on at sex clubs to be
entirely inappropriate for juvenile literature. Repeated references to acts of
"indecency" committed with another man, or of men who allow themselves "to be
misused indecently", do not belong in a book for children. The language, where
Setterington used such slang terms as "queen" for an effeminate gay man, would
be totally lost on a child reader under the age of ten. Just who was
Setterington writing this book for? For the child of Perez Hilton? For the son
of Brüno?
After
the liberation of the concentration camps it is a sad fact that the gay men who
were incarcerated were not set free. Since they were sent to the camps for being
homosexual, and homosexuality was still a crime in Germany after World War II,
gay men had to continue serving their sentences and were transferred to other
prisons. It took forty years before any public monument was erected to honour
the gay victims of the camps. Before then:
"The
gay community was not even allowed to participate in the memorial services held
at concentration camps or at war memorials. In 1970 gay activists in Amsterdam
arrived at the National War Memorial in Dam Square with a lavender wreath to
honor the gay men who had perished. The activists were arrested, and the wreath
was removed and denounced as a disgrace."
Setterington
ended Branded with updates and photos of all the men he profiled. Sadly
there are no more survivors who were branded by the pink triangle, as Rudolf
Brazda died in August 2011. The bibliography provided a lengthy list of
survivor memoirs which are essential reading for learning about gay history in
Europe during World War II.
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