The Independent
January 27, 2005
AUSCHWITZ REMEMBERED: THE SHADOW OF AUSCHWITZ
by John Lichfield
The turn-off is just past a BP petrol station, close to a Leclerc
supermarket. You leave a roundabout and cross a concrete flyover. You
could be on the edge of any town in early 21st-century Europe.
Ahead, through the swirling snow, looms a single railway line,
disappearing through a tower in a long, red-brick building – the
terminus of a short branch line to Auschwitz-Birkenau built in the
spring of 1944. Beyond are three long railway sidings, tall
barbed-wire enclosures, wooden watch- towers, and dark huts in neat
lines. Some huts are ruined. Others stand pristine in freshly fallen
snow, as if enchanted by a curse and frozen for all time.
All is symmetrical and orderly, the product of rational, intelligent
minds – modern, Western minds.
If you stroll to the end of the railway tracks, you find the rubble
of two buildings strewn in front of a small birch wood (Birke means
birch tree.) Two other ruins stand a little way over to the right.
The remains of two cruder buildings can be seen in the distance.
Inside, or just outside, these six buildings at least one million
people, almost all of them Jews, were gassed and cremated during
1942, 1943 and 1944. Birkenau, only part of the Auschwitz complex,
was, among other things, a factory, a purpose-built human abattoir,
an assembly line of death.
The factory’s raw materials were men, women and children, whose only
crime was to be Jewish or Gypsy. The Jews came initially from other
parts of Poland and nearby Slovakia. Later, they were transported for
hundreds of miles across Europe, from Greece, from Hungary, from
France, from Belgium, from the Netherlands, to be reduced to ashes,
their gold teeth, hair, clothes, false limbs recycled into raw
materials for the Nazi war effort. These, however, were merely
by-products. The chief purpose of Auschwitz- Birkenau was to destroy
a race and to obliterate the 800-year-old Jewish- European
civilisation. (In this second task, the Nazis succeeded.)
Auschwitz was not, in itself, the Holocaust. There were five other
Nazi death camps in Poland, some of whose names are still scarcely
known to the general public (Belzec, where 550,000 Jews are thought
to have died; Sobibor, where 200,000 died).
Auschwitz has, nonetheless, become the prime symbol of the
bureaucratically organised, orderly frenzy of killing in which at
least five million European Jews were murdered by the Nazis (maybe as
many as six million) between 1939 and 1945.
Many other victims were also deemed unfit to live by the perverted
Darwinism of Nazi, racial ideology: not just Gypsies but also
homosexuals and the handicapped. Pre-planned Nazi mass murders were
also carried out – it is sometimes forgotten in the West – of
hundreds of thousands of Russians and at least 1,500,000 Polish
officers, intellectuals, students, priests and randomly seized
civilians. The Poles were slaughtered to reduce their country to a
slave state, permanently colonised by Germans.
On a first visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau, the mind revolts against the
proximity of roundabouts and barbed wire, of supermarkets and gas
chambers; against the juxtaposition of the death camp and the
pleasant Polish town of Oswiecim, now as much part of the European
Union as Dorking or Macclesfield. In truth, this is no anachronism,
but a useful reminder. The Holocaust began three years after Walt
Disney made Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs; 20 years before The
Beatles and Swinging London. Auschwitz is part of Modern Times.
Today, politicians from 40 countries will travel to the Birkenau camp
to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the discovery of Auschwitz by
Soviet troops in January 1945. Up to 400 survivors – the remaining,
fit survivors of the maybe 60,000 survivors in 1945 – are expected to
be there.
The Queen will attend a ceremony to mark Holocaust Day at Westminster
Hall in London with other survivors.
Among those at the Birkenau commemoration will be Raphael Esrail, 80,
who was taken to Auschwitz from France in February 1944, at the age
of 19, and is now secretary general of the French association of
Auschwitz victims. “There have been other anniversaries and there
will be others still to come,” he said, “but this is maybe the most
important. First, because it will be the last big anniversary to have
so many living eyewitnesses. Most of us are already in our eighties.”
“But it is crucial also for another reason. The world has changed.
And not in the way we had hoped. After the war, we comforted
ourselves that this terrible experience might finally teach mankind
to love mankind, but what do we see now? We see again the rise of
anti-Semitism and we see a world torn apart by fanatical hatreds and
by absolute certainties.”
In other words, the most important, single lesson that we can learn
from today’s commemorations is that Auschwitz is not just part of our
history. It is part of our present. This is a lesson that seems to
have escaped the 45 per cent of Britons – according to a recent poll
– who have not heard of Auschwitz.
In truth, the story of the Holocaust is imperfectly understood, even
by many of us who think we know what happened. (I was astonished by
my own ignorance when I visited Auschwitz, even though my father was
Jewish, even though some of my distant, Slovakian-Jewish relatives
almost certainly died there.)
The details are imperfectly known, even to honest, specialist
historians, because so much of the evidence was destroyed by the
Nazis themselves in 1943-44. The story was further muddied by the
Soviet domination of Poland up to 1990 – years when Auschwitz was
turned into an “anti-fascist” shrine and the suffering of the Jews
was pushed into the background.
Did 5,000,000 Jews die in the Holocaust or 6,000,000? Even now,
honest historians disagree. The generally accepted figure of
1,100,000 dead in Auschwitz alone (including 960,000 Jews, 75,000
Poles and 21,000 gypsies) is a “conservative estimate”, according to
the head archivist of the Polish state museum on the site, Piotr
Setkiewicz. “It was almost certainly more than that. These are just
the people that we can say with absolute certainty died here.”
One of the perverted oddities of the Final Solution is the mixture of
brazen pride and shame with which it was implemented. Intelligent,
educated men believed that they had a right to destroy millions of
fellow human beings. At the same time, they felt it was necessary to
lie about, and cover up, what they were doing. The same twin impulses
– denial on the one hand, and pride in the Holocaust on the other –
persist among Nazi apologists to this day.
The 60th anniversary has brought an abundance of new studies,
including the excellent BBC television series on Auschwitz, and the
accompanying book by Laurence Rees. All the same, confusions remain
in many educated and unprejudiced minds: confusions which are often
exploited by Holocaust- deniers and relativisers. There is,
especially, an abiding confusion about the different kinds of camps
which existed in the Nazi archipelago of evil.
Broadly speaking, there were labour camps, concentration camps and
death camps. Life in the labour and concentration camps, such as
Belsen, south of Hamburg, and Dachau, north of Munich, was barbaric.
Life expectancy was short. These camps had tens of thousands of
political prisoners, and resistance activists, from Germany and from
occupied countries – and some high-profile Jews.
Much of the confusion, in the West, arises because these camps, in
the western part of Germany, were liberated by the British and the
Americans. They provided the images which were first seared onto the
world’s memory and conscience: images of walking skeletons in striped
uniforms and heaps of emaciated bodies being cleared by bulldozers.
But these were not the death camps. There were no planned mass
killings – no gas chambers or crematoria – in Belsen or Dachau or
Ravensbruck or Mauthausen or anywhere within Germany’s pre-war
borders.
The Holocaust happened further east, in Poland, notably at Auschwitz
but also in five other camps, some of which were no larger than three
or four football pitches: Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor, Chelmno and
Majdanek.
The unfamiliarity of these names – apart from Treblinka –
is significant, and deliberate. They were dismantled, and the ground
ploughed over and planted with trees, by the SS at the end of 1943.
By that time, it is estimated that 1,700,000 people had been murdered
there, mostly Polish Jews, mostly killed by carbon-monoxide poisoning
(Zyklon- B gas was an Auschwitz speciality.)
Mr Setkiewicz says: “We have very, very little direct information on
what happened in these places. There are few records, few eyewitness
accounts, no survivors. We know only that transports took Jews out of
the ghettos established by the Nazis in Warsaw and other cities and
they took them to these camps, which were set up as extermination
centres. There was no room for people to live or work in these
places. No one came back.”
Auschwitz was unique. It was the only site which contained both an
extermination camp and a labour camp (in fact 40 different camps,
spread over an area covering 40 square kilometres, the Auschwitz
“zone of interest”).
Because both kinds of camp existed side by side, there are survivors,
Jewish survivors and Polish survivors, to tell us what happened in
Auschwitz. But the existence of both kinds of camp on one site, or at
one complex of sites, is also fertile ground for the negationists.
Look, they say, Auschwitz had a swimming pool; it had a brothel for
inmates, an orchestra, a sauna. How bad could it have been? Yes,
Auschwitz had an orchestra but most of the 1,100,000 people who died
there never heard it play.
The complex has two main camps: the original Polish army barracks
taken over by the Nazis in 1940, and the much larger Birkenau camp,
three kilometres away, built by slave labour from October 1941.
The original Auschwitz camp – which looks like a pleasant army base
or a university campus – has its own horrific tale to tell. It was
here that the first mass killings of Poles and Russian prisoners of
war took place. It was here that the camp commandant, Rudolf Hoss,
devised methods of mass slaughter with Zyklon-B in the first of the
Auschwitz gas chambers (built at the end of the garden where his
children played).
It was here that the SS doctor Josef Mengele conducted medical
experiments on twins and pregnant women. It was here that the
orchestra, comprised of musically talented inmates, played merry
dance tunes and waltzes as the half-starved work groups – kommandos –
struggled in and out of the gate marked Arbeit macht frei (work makes
you free).
The swimming pool and brothel also existed – but only for the kapos
or inmates promoted to be overseers.
Tens of thousands of people died in the original camp but the greater
slaughter happened down the road at Birkenau, conceived originally as
a labour camp but then developed into an industrial killing-machine.
Another grim distinction needs to be made. The Belsen-generated image
of the Holocaust – emaciated people in striped uniforms being herded
into gas chambers – is largely false. Most of those who died at
Auschwitz never wore camp uniforms. They never received a number
tattooed on their forearm (another Auschwitz speciality which did not
occur elsewhere). Most were led, or taken in trucks, directly from
the trains to the chambers. They died, not as dehumanised skeletons,
but as people looking and feeling like citizens of the mid-20th
century.
When a train arrived (from Hungary or Holland or France), the
prisoners – 1,200 to 1,500 on each train – were divided into columns
of men and columns of women and children. The SS doctors and guards,
often behaving with extreme politeness, selected maybe 200 young men
and women from each train to be admitted to the camp as slaves for
the Nazi war machine. The remainder were taken to the far end of the
site – to the place where tomorrow’s ceremony will take place. They
were made to undress and told they had to take a shower. They were
led into the gas chambers and murdered as they huddled in family
groups.
Their bodies were removed by the members of the sonderkommando – the
Jews and other prisoners forced to do the most horrific work to
protect the minds of the SS guards. Gold teeth, rings and hair were
cut from the bodies before they were burnt. (The hair was made into,
among other things, socks for submariners.)
It is estimated that Birkenau, when functioning at its most
efficient, could murder and burn 20,000 people in a day.
How do we know all this? The Holocaust deniers say we don’t know;
that it is largely made up or exaggerated; that no evidence exists
that the gas chambers – destroyed by the SS in January 1945 – were
gas chambers. (On surviving plans they are described as “morgues”.)
In truth, the amount of direct and circumstantial evidence of what
happened in Auschwitz-Birkenau is huge. Twenty-five photographs were
taken by an unknown SS guard, discovered in an album when the camp
was liberated, showing the process of “selection” of trainloads of
Hungarian Jews in 1944. Eyewitness accounts have been given by SS men
and by survivors, including members of the sonderkommando, the few
who survived and others who buried their testimony in the earth of
the camp.
Plans show the “morgues” were designed to be gas-tight and have a
high ambient temperature – counter-productive for a morgue but
necessary to activate pellets of Zyklon-B. (One plan also exists
which labels the gas chamber not as as a morgue, but as a “gas
chamber”).
Mr Setkiewicz says: “Do we have one piece of evidence which proves
beyond all doubt that the Holocaust happened? No. We have a
thousand.”
The museum at the original Auschwitz camp presents this evidence in
crushing, disturbing mass. Human hair is piled behind a glass window
and covers the area of two tennis courts. Similar picture-windows
display heaps of shoes, spectacles, suitcases, false legs and arms,
crutches and clothes found when the camp was liberated six decades
ago.
A newer exhibition has also been opened in the “sauna” at Birkenau.
This was, in fact, the building where the few selected to work and
suffer, rather than to die instantly, were stripped, shaved and
tattooed. This display speaks of the individual ordinariness of
thousands of obliterated lives. It shows hundreds of photographs,
mysteriously found in a suitcase at the site – all of them pre-war
family snaps taken by Jews living in the town of Bedzin: snaps of
weddings and walking trips, grinning young men acting the fool,
brothers arm in arm, happy picnics and shopping expeditions.
In the next room is a display of objects, confiscated from Jews as
they arrived at the camp: banal objects, precious objects, objects
which suggest that many of those who arrived here had no conception
of the fate awaiting them. There are cigarette lighters and
cheese-graters, picnic baskets and kettles, razors and chess sets,
hairbrushes and cameras.
Once again, you are reminded that the Holocaust happened in a time
like the present, to people like you and me. Visiting Auschwitz, and
seeing sights like these, you wrestle with an impossible question.
What makes Auschwitz and the Holocaust different? Are they different?
Massacres and genocides have been carried out throughout history,
from Genghis Khan to the Crusades, from the American Plains to
Turkish Armenia,
Lebanon, Cambodia, Rwanda and Bosnia. Even the numbers killed in the
Holocaust are not unique. Stalin killed more, for reasons of
expediency and terror, than Hitler killed for reasons of race and
ideology. Studies in comparative evil are barren and pointless: all
of these crimes are monstrous.
And yet there is something about the Holocaust which sets it apart,
in its essence, if not its enormity. Here was a genocide willed and
planned by a modern industrial state, using all the paraphernalia of
modernity, from trains to toxic gases. Here was a genocide, willed
not just because a people were occupying space coveted by another
people but because of a self-induced, obsessive, racial fear and
hatred.
In no other genocide, before or since, have hundreds of thousands of
people been sought out and shipped hundreds of miles, at great
expense, to their instant murder. In no other genocide have bodies
been treated as industrial raw materials, coldly denying the humanity
of the victims even in death.
It took a very modern and advanced state to conceive and organise
such an elaborate, bureaucratic genocide. It took all the resources
of modern politics and mass media to brain-wash an entire people so
that they were complicit in murder on an industrial scale.
What is the way to Auschwitz? The road does not just start beside a
roundabout and a BP petrol station.
Teresa Swiebocka, the senior curator at the Auschwitz museum, who
also teaches on the meaning of the Holocaust, said: “The Holocaust
did not begin in 1939 or 1941. It began many years earlier. It began
with an obsession that one nation, one race, had absolute wisdom and
absolute rights, superior to those of other races or religions.
“The question people should ask when they come here, or watch the
anniversary ceremonies, is how can civilised people in a modern state
be brought so far and so low? How does it begin? At what point do you
take a turning which leads you eventually on to a road marked
Auschwitz?”