Last Tuesday, 300 survivors of the infamous Nazi death camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau, together with political leaders, gathered on the snow-covered expanse that was hell on earth some 70 years ago. They came from many countries, not simply to commemorate the past but mainly determined to make a statement about the future:
“Auschwitz – under whatever name – never again.”
These very old and mostly infirm men and women represented the well over one million murdered prisoners. Most of them, who were European Jews, were gassed, shot, hanged and burned at this concentration camp. But there were also Poles, Catholics, Roma, homosexuals, people with disability and all shades of political opposition to the Nazis.
The survivors present at the commemorative ceremony are the strongest evidence possible to man’s inhumanity to his fellow man. Seventy years later, the daily cruelty that they were subjected too for so long is still etched in their minds and on their faces.
But their presence is a strong statement to the human spirit’s determination to win against all odds. The once powerful and evil Nazis are now considered to be the scum of the earth. They were not just defeated but despised. Auschwitz survivor Halina Birenbaum told the commemorative gathering: “I lived my mother’s dream to see the oppressor defeated.”
Auschwitz-Birkenau should be a must-see location for, at least, a once-in-a-lifetime pilgrimage. I did mine in 2010. It is an unforgettable experience and a great lesson in humanity. As I walked from hall to hall I listened to the sombre words of the guide describing horrors beyond belief while tears profusely dampened my face.
Large photos of inmates arriving at the camp drape the walls. Children are seen among the new arrivals. We walked into a room full of suitcases. The victims were all asked to bring only one suitcase each. They crammed the best they had, hoping to be using it themselves, only to find that the best was to be stolen by their murderers.
The victims wrote their names, date of birth and city of origin on the suitcases. One showed that the owner was a 40-year-old man. Probably he was deemed to be strong enough to work and slave. Consequently he was kept alive.
Another suitcase had the name of a five-year-old girl. She did not celebrate her sixth birthday. Anyone under 14 was immediately sent to the gas chambers as he or she was deemed not to be productive, or else subjected to the monstrous experiments of Josef Mengele.
We walked in the direction of the infamous gas chambers. On the outside, they looked like normal buildings. There inmates were ordered to strip naked. They were told that once inside they were going to be disinfected. They were then packed like sardines. A chamber that could have taken, perhaps 400, was crammed with 700 poor souls. The doors are closed. From two openings on the roof, the SS emptied the contents of two tins full of Zyklon B, a cyanide-based pesticide invented in Germany in the 1920s. The high temperature brought about by the mass of bodies turns pesticide into lethal gas. Five minutes of intense terror and desperation precede a cruel death.
In the adjacent room the furnaces await to consume the corpses. As a further twist in the Nazi’s depravity, the furnaces were manned by prisoners.
But today, in sharp contrast with the Germans, we cannot say that we don’t know what is happening
Awschwitz-Birkenau and other concentration camps dotted around Europe are the work of diabolical people. Even Lucifer would be shocked by the horror and evil created there.
I could not but make mine the heartfelt cry uttered by Pope Benedict XVI – a son of Germany – in May 2006 when he visited Auschwitz-Birkenau: “Why, Lord, did You remain silent? How could You tolerate all this?”
His intellectually deep and emotionally-charged address linked the past with the present and impelled us to act so that Holocausts will not be repeated. He said: “Let us cry out to God, with all our hearts, at the present hour, when new misfortunes befall us, when all the forces of darkness seem to issue anew from human hearts: whether it is the abuse of God’s name as a means of justifying senseless violence against innocent persons, or the cynicism which refuses to acknowledge God and ridicules faith in Him.
“Let us cry out to God, that He may draw men and women to conversion and help them to see that violence does not bring peace, but only generates more violence – a morass of devastation in which everyone is ultimately the loser. The God in whom we believe is a God of reason – a reason, to be sure, which is not a kind of cold mathematics of the universe, but is one with love and with goodness.”
The words of Benedict XVI were echoed in one way or another by several political leaders who participated in the commemoration, which was held at a time when the world is passing through another period of intolerance evidenced in several quarters.
Roman Kent, one of the survivors, put the same feeling in very strong words: “We survivors do not want our past to be our children’s future.”
There were Holocausts before the Nazi-generated one. The Indios of South America and the Africans reduced to slavery were living proofs. There were other Holocausts post-Nazism. Stalin had his gulags and the Khmer Rouge had their killing fields. Rwanda is living proof of the most horrendous genocide, and the Balkans, nearer home, went through disastrous ethnic cleansing.
Humans invent ways of being inhumane to members of their own species. The savagery of ISIS and other Muslim fundamentalists immediately springs to mind. The persecution of gays in Russia and a number of other countries, the sufferings of the Roma people, and the displaced people in so many parts of the world, the rising xenophobia, the subtle and not so subtle political intolerance and religious persecution are just a few examples.
It seems that humans never learn.
But today, in sharp contrast with the Germans, we cannot say that we don’t know what is happening. Our 24-hour cycle of continuous news places us in the middle of things, horrible or nice. Whoever pretends not to see becomes an accomplice. Not being our brother’s keepers is thus definitively not an option.
joseph.borg@um.edu.mt