Commentary
I’ve taken hundreds of international trips, visiting cultural and religious sites and observing natural wonders across the world.
Yet None affected me like Dachau and Auschwitz-Birkenau.
In Dachau I strode through wooden barracks where slave labor was housed without bedding and worked in the freezing cold without shoes or winter garments. The grisly gallows faced the crematoria where the last image presented to Jews before their necks were snapped was clouds of foul-smelling smoke generated by the burning bodies of their friends and fellow prisoners.
Auschwitz featured bullet marks on a stone wall where countless innocents were shot. I stood in the actual gas chambers where 1.5 million of the 6 million Jews who perished were murdered. The fingernail scratches down the locked doors resemble a horror movie more than life.
What happened at Nazi concentration camps is unfathomable. It’s hard to grasp how the Germans could coldly and methodically load victims into cattle cars at gunpoint, starve, beat, enslave, and murder without qualms—the banality of evil symbolized by Adolf Eichmann in the words of
Hannah Arendt.
Alongside me on this solemn pilgrimage were several weeping Jewish friends whose relatives were exterminated in the Holocaust. Evil is infinite. Saintliness is sharply rationed. It is frightening that notwithstanding “never again” genocide endures. Think of the Uyghurs, Falun Gong, and Tibetans in China, the Rohingya in Myanmar, Darfur in Sudan, the Tutsi in Rwanda. Do we forget nothing and learn nothing? We need constant reminders from
John Donne: “Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”
House 88 is the former residence of the Commandant of Auschwitz Rudolf Höss recently acquired by the Counter Extremism Project supported by The Fund to End Antisemitism, Extremism, and Hate. It
has been converted from a house of horror to ARCHER, the Auschwitz Research Centre on Hate, Extremism and Radicalization. For years to come, ARCHER will fight anti-Semitism through research, policy development, and education.
House 88 feels ordinary, big enough to accommodate the five Höss children who reportedly enjoyed carefree childhoods as Jewish children were mercilessly murdered just yards away.
Rudolf’s daughter, Brigitte Höss,
remembers playing with her turtles in the house’s garden and going for boat rides with her father in a nearby river. His wife, Hedwig, called the house “paradise.”
But the house’s garden wall was also the camp wall. The view through the second story windows: crematoria.
Auschwitz shows you the scale of Nazi evil, while ARCHER proves its banality. Mass murderers can be loving fathers. Kids can remember a happy childhood under the shadow of a chimney reeking of burned flesh. Monsters can live anywhere, even next door.
Auschwitz proves man’s inhumanity to man. The appalling phenomenon is as old as the Bible. Auschwitz was not the evil handiwork only of Nazis. There were many eager collaborators in other countries, including Poland.
Is seeing believing? It is shocking that Holocaust deniers endure despite the mountains of ocular evidence and more than 19,000 pages of Nuremberg trial transcripts and exhibits.
More than 50 years later in 1997, the Polish Government began returning Jewish heritage sites like synagogues and cemeteries to the Jewish community. The president of Poland recently joined the president of Israel for the “
March of the Living,” a commemorative ceremony held annually on Holocaust Remembrance Day.
“Never again hatred, never again chauvinism, never again antisemitism,”
he said. People cannot “remain silent in the face of any manifestations of hatred between nations, or any manifestations of racial and ethnic hatred.”
It is up to us to highly resolve that the 6 million victims of the Holocaust shall not have perished in vain by striving to make “never again” a reality rather than an empty slogan.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
