I told her about the World War II Nazi concentration camps. Many of them operated as industrial work camps staffed by the most able and skilled workers of the Jewish population. I told her that these were also the people that Hitler had on his agenda to eradicate. "The camps in which these people were imprisoned operated as vast prison factories," I said to her. "They were producing essential war materials for the German war machine. They were manufacturing the stuff that was needed at the front lines. Nevertheless, their productive capacity, as vital as it was for the war, provided no assurance that they wouldn't be killed in large numbers at any moment. And they were killed. They were killed in spite of the urgent need for their products at the front. They were killed regardless of the economic consequences. In a single two-day killing spree, sometime in November 1943, the German SS shot 43,000 of their Jewish prison workers to death. The German SS called this madness, 'Operation Harvest Festival.' In the year before, in 1942, the German SS killed a million Jewish workers right in the midst of a growing labor shortage. The killing agenda seemed to supersede the most critical economic considerations. The Warsaw ghetto eradication is another example of this tragedy. The ghetto had once housed close to a half a million people. The ghetto had been a significant production center for war materials for the German army. The entire ghetto was eradicated in 1942. The people and their factories were systematically destroyed in a massive rampage, with the full knowledge that a considerable productive capacity would be lost. The killing of the Dalits by Thevars must be seen in that light. Economic considerations seem to fade into thin air at the line of demarcation where people cease to be regarded as human beings. That's what happens when fascism begins to rule, which rules in the minds of empty people who have lost their humanity and with it their sanity. Fascist insanity alone creates those lines of demarcation, nothing real does. Obviously, this lack of sanity can't be resolved by reacting to violence with violence, or with protest demonstrations. That is why the Dalits have failed."

      "How then, can the problem be solved?" Indira asked.

      I hugged her close to me again and returned her kiss. "This is your answer," I said. "The kind of problem that we face can only be addressed by rebuilding all people's humanity; by rebuilding their lost awareness of it; and by rebuilding their love for it. The bottom line is that we have to go back and resort to universal principles, because this entire huge problem is really nothing more than a spiritual and cultural problem. The colonial occupation of India had destroyed so much of the humanity of the people and the riches of the Indian culture, that a vast spiritual and scientific redevelopment is now required to repair the damage. But that's the only avenue society has to move ahead again on the humanist scale. The Dalit problem is that kind of problem. It is the symptom of a collective problem. It requires a deep reaching cultural solution across the board. But how is one to do this? I think India is a rich country in this respect, with a profound spiritual history as a foundation to build on, something that can inspire love in people's heart for themselves, for their humanity, and thereby for each other. Universal love begins at the home front. It begins within as a love for our universal humanity. All of that, Indira, obviously adds up to a long story, but there is light at the end of the tunnel."

      I paused and hugged her again. Then I added another kiss. "If you allow me to invite you for a drink at my hotel, I'll attempt to tell you how I think this problem can be resolved."

      She began to laugh. "That won't be possible," she said. "Your hotel doesn't have a bar."

      "What, no bar! Don't they have bars in the hotels in India?" I asked and began to laugh, too.

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Stories about  Healing from novels by Rolf A. F. Witzsche