Auschwitz remains stark after 60 years

JOSEPH N. BELL

I suspect that all of us have a handful of places or events in our

lives that leave such an indelible impression that they are never

very far from our consciousness. One such place for me is the Nazi

death factory called Auschwitz.

It has been much on my mind this past week as both the print media

and television have been full of remembrances of this place on the

60th anniversary of its liberation by the Russian army. Although my

memories come from a visit long after the carnage that took place at

Auschwitz, they are nonetheless vivid.

Shortly after the Berlin Wall fell, my wife and I explored Eastern

Europe on our own. Not from tour buses, but rather from exhausted

nights in railway stations where we couldn’t read the signs or speak

the language. A major stop was Warsaw, where my wife’s ancestors once

lived. We were shocked to find that all that was left of the Warsaw

ghetto, where many thousands of Polish Jews had been herded, held

captive and, finally, massacred, was a plaque on a grassy knoll. Not

a single artifact, reproduction or piece of physical evidence remains

to serve as a gravestone for the victims who died there.

But not Auschwitz. It is much as the Germans left it 60 years ago.

We took a bus from Krakow -- a delightful river city that ironically

serves as the gateway to the horrors of Auschwitz -- enduring some 30

miles of garrulous talk in broken English from an anti-Semitic female

bus driver who dropped us off at the gates to the prison camp on a

lovely late summer day. There was a long, graveled walk to an arch

that marked the entrance. We got our first view of the interior of

the camp -- and were stopped dead in our tracks -- when we made a

sharp turn at the arch and saw a bevy of German soldiers in uniform,

many of them holding straining police dogs on tight leashes, standing

guard over dozens of prisoners in striped clothing.

That’s the scene deeply implanted in my memory. We found out

quickly that a movie was being shot there that day, but the

fictitious German guards became more and more real to me as we

explored the camp, and, by day’s end, I found myself unable to put

down a smoldering hatred of the actors playing the Nazi soldiers.

Auschwitz was a highly compact factory, designed with remarkable

efficiency to do its job: kill and dispose of an entire race of

people quickly, expeditiously and with the smallest possible

overhead. Genocide is usually messy. The Nazis reduced it to a

technological marvel of creative engineering. As this recognition

dawned, the cold, clinical ability to dehumanize millions of people

overwhelmed me, especially when I stood at the most devastating spot

in this chamber of horrors: the railroad siding where the cars

carrying the Jewish prisoners would come to a halt.

It was only a minute’s walk from the unloading platform to the

room, full of overhead showers, where most of the new arrivals were

sent to disrobe and supposedly be deloused. But instead of water, the

showers pumped out gas. Within a few minutes of arriving at this

railroad way station, the new prisoners were dead. What was about to

happen to them was so monstrous that the victims had no premonition

of their death. Neither did their loved ones who were cut off from

them by German officers sitting at a table, playing God, deciding

what prisoners might be useful to them, and temporarily extending

their lives before sending the rest down that brief walk to the

lethal showers.

I think of that railroad siding often these days, because it

speaks so eloquently to the ability of human beings to focus so

totally on ends -- which they have persuaded themselves are

necessary, whatever the cost -- that they blind themselves to the

means employed to achieve those ends.

Every element of Auschwitz that we saw shouts that message. There

were the vast, glassed-in exhibits of victims’ shoes and luggage --

one bag bearing the imprint of the fabled Anne Frank. The

crematorium, where the bodies were shoveled into furnaces that

reduced them to ashes. The gallows where the commandant of Auschwitz

was hung by the liberating army -- one life in exchange for more than

a million others in this death factory. The victims were mostly Jews,

but the Nazis also tried to rid their society of gypsies, political

opponents and homosexuals, the latter a choice that might be usefully

pondered today.

So might some of the things said by world leaders in the ceremony

at Auschwitz last week. Vice President Dick Cheney, for example, who

represented the United States, noted that the Holocaust took place

“in the heart of the civilized world” and added, “The story of the

camps shows that evil is real and must be called by its name and

confronted.” Good advice -- especially for people and nations with

great power who must be willing to look inside as well as outside for

manifestations of evil.

In a play called “Golda’s Balcony,” which just opened in Los

Angeles, the late Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir sums this up

powerfully when she asks, “What happens when idealism becomes power?

It kills. To save a world you create -- and this is a terrible

question -- how many worlds are you entitled to destroy?”

Like the veterans of World War II, the surviving victims of the

Nazi death camps will die off soon, leaving a clearer field for the

Neanderthals who would have us believe the Holocaust never happened.

That’s why these anniversary recognitions must continue. We need to

be reminded and to introduce new generations to the depths of evil to

which humankind can descend when the means are subverted totally to

the ends -- especially when the power is in the hands of allegedly

intelligent and sophisticated people. We will never have a better

example than the Holocaust.

* JOSEPH N. BELL is a resident of Santa Ana Heights. His column

appears Thursdays.