Let Us Remember

“Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” George Santayana

Auschwitz.  Ironically, in this place of death for so many, the grounds were green when we walked through . . . spring green, the color that suggested new Easter dresses, shiny white shoes, and a hat.  It made me think of Easter baskets, hidden colored eggs, Easter morning church service, resurrection, and new life.

During the Holocaust, nothing was green at Auschwitz; all was gray and harsh; there was little hope.  This camp was an overcrowded place where people were routinely tortured, humiliated, laughed at, starved, and exterminated. Auschwitz and its sister camp, Birkenau, are among twenty-three such camps, six of which were also extermination centers.  Eight more locations were used as euthanasia centers for extermination of the old and disabled.

Precise records do not exist.  Not everyone lived long enough to be given a number.   People arrived by long trains and were immediately sorted as they jumped out of boxcars onto the platform. Some had been standing shoulder to shoulder in the boxcar for days with no food, no sanitary facilities. As they stood on the train platform, they were sorted. If selected to be exterminated, most people had no notion of what was coming. They only knew they were being separated from family.  It had to be heart-wrenching.  They said goodbye and marched away.  These people were never registered or recorded; they were nothing. 

There were no winners in the sorting.  Those not chosen to march away to the gas chambers lived in hell at Auschwitz.  An identification number was tattooed on their arm and their heads were shaved.  Their lives were spared only to serve as a source of slave labor.  Concentration camps were labor camps; everyone worked, even children as young as 10; if big enough and strong enough, they worked.  Laborers lived on 300 to 500 calories a day.   Those who survived the initial selection worked from before dawn until after dark with little food and slept one next to the other lying on a mat next to another mat or stacked on shelves three bunks high.  The two, three, or four people who bunked on the top bunk, were lucky.  The people lying in the middle and bottom bunks received the fallings of those above them . . . typhus, diarrhea, and more.

The facts:

30% of Auschwitz prisoners were women.  They worked side by side with men doing same work.  Block 10 held women on whom medical experiments were conducted.

Crematoriums became overworked.  Their capacity could not handle the demand.  Prisoners were sent to the nearby village of Birkenau to build, brick by brick, new barracks and new gas chambers designed to accommodate 2,000 people at a time, and a new crematorium.  Birkenau was ten times the size of Auschwitz.  When the new crematorium could no longer handle the demand, the bodies were simply piled and burned.  Their ashes sifted down like snow.

1.3 million people were sent to Auschwitz camps:  1.1 million were Jews, 960,000 died.  The 200,000 others there were non-Jewish Poles. Romanian gypsies, Russian POWs, and homosexuals.

The gas chambers at Auschwitz and Birkenau were underground.  Many times, people had no idea where they were going and what was going to happen to them.  The crematoriums were attached and above ground. Ashes were dumped in a pond created for them. When the pond was filled, the ashes were dumped in the river, Sole.

Prisoners who got out of line were punished. For slight infractions, they could be committed to the starvation cell with no food, no water; or the suffocating cell with no window, no door, or finally, the worst, in the standing cell where four people stood together with no food, no water, and no sanitary facilities in a 4′ x 4′ concrete cube night and day, night and day.  Most people died in any of these.

Although the numbers are not precise, researchers believe between 1941 and 1945, six million Jews and another eleven million human beings, Soviet civilians, Soviet POWs. Poles, Serbs, Romanians, Slovenes, and other undesirables such as Freemasons, Spanish Republicans, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and homosexuals died across occupied Europe at the hand of the Third Richt.

Take a breath . . .

There are many stories of survival and brave people who risked their lives to save Jews and others during the Holocaust, like the Warsaw Zoo director and his wife.  Another familiar true story is the one about the German businessman who came to Krakow to profit from manufacturing enamelware and canteens in his factory for the German army.  Labor for his factory was almost free.  Both Krakow Poles and Jews from the Krakow Jewish Ghetto worked in Oskar Schindler’s factory.  Over time he became sympathetic to his workers’ plight while yet maintaining the ear and association of the Germans.  At his own expense, he created a sub-camp for his employees with better-than-labor-camp barracks and an extra meal each day.   In the fall of 1944, due to the approaching Eastern Front, Schindler convinced the German military to allow him to relocate his armament factory to the Czech Republic.  He was successful in convincing the Germans he needed to take his skilled workers with him.  In doing so, he saved the lives of over 700 men and 300 women . . . on Schindler’s List.

Take a breath.

My God!!!  I pray please let us all read, learn, remember, and beware.  Let us never, ever harbor fear and hate toward a race, ethnicity, lifestyle, or religion thought so undesirable as to be done away with.

Nothing like this should ever, ever happen again.

As a footnote, I know my words alone cannot change the perspective of some. I do however encourage everyone to do homework. It is critical. Go to the library. Research online. Read every article and every book you can find about Hitler and the Holocaust with no regard to whether the writer is a liberal or conservative. To kick things off, and to give me satisfaction in knowing I tried, here are two articles showing clearly how a charismatic leader in an uncertain social climate can possibly pave the way to a future that looks much like the past.

https://tdkehoe.medium.com/thirteen-similarities-between-donald-trump-and-adolf-hitler-3a97a8055dde

Opinion | Leading Civil Rights Lawyer Shows 20 Ways Trump Is Copying Hitler’s Early Rhetoric and Policies | Common Dreams