OSWIEÇIM, POLAND — A woman in our group wonders aloud if the birds were singing when the air was filled with ash. I walk over to the fence and balance my recorder on the rusting strands of barbed wire. The rows of birches outside the fence are aflutter with birds. A rustling wind provides accompaniment to their song.
About 20 feet away is a two-story sentry tower of brown wood. The towers occur at regular intervals along the fence. Though no longer charged with electricity, the 9-foot-high fence with its concrete posts is still impregnable after 75 years. The barbed wire encloses 425-acres, a flat, verdant expanse that gets its name from the German for “birch meadow.”
I am standing on the grounds of Auschwitz II-Birkenau, the most notorious of the Nazi death camps. A stone’s throw away are the ruins of two brick buildings. These were crematoria where most of the 1.1 million men, women and children murdered here were gassed and their bodies burned.
It is Sunday, Mother’s Day, and I’m here with a friend, who has signed us on with a bus tour of German high school students, teachers and parents.
In the far distance, other tour groups drift through the residue of 300 buildings once used to house prisoners. At its peak, the four crematoria here could “process” 5,000 prisoners a day. Some of the buildings were stables before becoming prisoner barracks. In a space built for 52 horses, 400 humans were crammed, sometimes more.
Earlier, in one of the stables, our guide described conditions the prisoners suffered: dirty straw for beds, bitter cold, rats, disease, malnutrition, abuse by sadistic SS guards. I shivered as a cool wind blew through the building. What it was like to be poorly clothed prisoners in the Polish winter is difficult to imagine.
Auschwitz, the best known of the camps associated with the Holocaust, was established in 1940 for Polish political prisoners. Eventually, the Germans deported people here from all over Europe, mostly Jews, but also dissidents, intellectuals, trade unionists, communists, homosexuals, gypsies and even Jehovah’s Witnesses. As the camp population grew, Auschwitz came to be known as a “factory of death.”
As the “Final Solution,” a euphemism for extermination of the Jews, became official Nazi doctrine at the end of 1941 and the need for greater capacity urgent, the Nazis established Auschwitz II-Birkenau here in a village about three kilometers from the original camp.
You study the Holocaust in school. You watch movies about it. You see photographs. Nothing prepares you for the reality of it.
The human hair on display in the dimly lit room hits you like a stomach punch. Piles and piles of it. The Russian liberators of Auschwitz found seven tons of hair, most of it from women, in large bales at the camp. The hair was shorn from the victims of the gas chambers and was sold to the German textile industry to make mattresses stuffing, rope, thread and lining for military uniforms.
The displays of baby shoes and broken dolls, the mountain of enamel kitchenware, the twisted pile of eyeglasses, the hallway lined with mug shots of victims, all are tangible evidence of lives extinguished here.
Though the precise number of victims of the Holocaust can never be known, 11 million is the accepted figure. The sick, dying and dead taken off the trains were sent straight to the gas chambers undocumented. Of those murdered, about six million were Jews, about two-thirds the Jewish population of Europe.
How could this have happened? How could an entire society of educated, civilized people — “the nation of poets and thinkers” — allow and perpetuate a prolonged and systematic killing of millions of innocent humans?
The short and obvious answer is Adolph Hitler and the conditions that existed in Germany that allowed his rise to power. One of those factors was a weakened central government, the result of a refusal of the two dominant political parties to work together.
“[Hitler’s policies] were half-baked, racist claptrap, writes historian Tony Howarth, “… but among the jumble of hysterical ideas, Hitler showed a sure sense of how to appeal to the lowest instincts of frightened masses.”
Much, if not most, of German society was complicit in the killings.
Hitler exterminated the Jews of Europe. But he did not do so alone. The task was so enormous, complex, time-consuming, and mentally and economically demanding that it took the best efforts of millions of Germans … All spheres of life in Germany actively participated. Businessmen, policemen, bankers, doctors, lawyers, soldiers, railroad and factory workers, chemists, pharmacists, foremen, production managers, economists, manufacturers, jewelers, diplomats, civil servants, propagandists, film makers and film stars, professors, teachers, politicians, mayors, party members, construction experts, art dealers, architects, landlords, janitors, truck drivers, clerks, industrialists, scientists, generals, and even shopkeepers — all were essential cogs in the machinery that accomplished the final solution.
— Konnilyn G. Feig, “Hitler’s Death Camps”
Hans, a retired elementary school teacher with us, recalled asking his uncle what he did during the war. The uncle said he worked with the railroad and ended the conversation. Later, when drinking, the uncle admitted he was an engineer on the trains that transported prisoners to Auschwitz.
“German diligence,” a woman in our group offered.
Could this ever happen again? Could it happen in America? As our country drifts toward polarization and intolerance, the question becomes ever more relevant.
Warns writer Primo Levi, writer, chemist and Auschwitz survivor, whose words are printed on the wall of one of the exhibits at the camp: “It happened, therefore it can happen again: This is the core of what we have to say.”
Birney Imes III is the immediate past publisher of The Dispatch.
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