Auschwitz was the largest of Germany's concentration camps, and was the site of the systematic degradation, dehumanization and murder of between 1.1 and 1.6 million people, 90 percent of whom were Jews from throughout Europe. The remainder were Catholic Poles, Gypsies (Roma) and homosexuals. Never before had a civilization been so efficient at extermination. During the years of its existence, some 700 prisoners attempted to escape. About 300 were successful. In late 1944, there was a revolt by some of the Jewish workers at the camp. Using homemade weapons, they overpowered their guards at two facilities and burned down the crematorium. Many of those revolting escaped, but all were eventually captured and executed.
The camp is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site and is visited by several thousand visitors daily. Based on the one day that I was there, the majority of those visitors are high school-age children on field trips from within Poland. There are, of course, other visitors that I saw, including German tourists and not a few old Jews. It is hard not to wonder what is going through the minds of each of those last two groups as they tour the grounds and read the signs and see the camp and see each other.
The gate to the camp reads Arbeit Macht Frei or Work Sets You Free. Of the more than 1.5 million people who entered the camp, fewer than 10,000 left alive.
Perhaps the most famous survivor of Auschwitz is Elie Wiesel. Wiesel entered the camp at the age of 16 with his father, mother and three sisters. He and two of his sisters managed to survive. His father died just a month before the camp was liberated. Wiesel went on to become a writer, professor and political activist who spoke and wrote frequently and eloquently about his ordeal during the Holocaust. In 1986 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace. The Nobel Committee called him a "messenger to mankind" and noted that through his struggle to come to terms with "his own personal experience of total humiliation and of the utter contempt for humanity shown in Hitler's death camps" Wiesel had delivered a powerful message of "peace, atonement and human dignity" to humanity.
We are not all Elie Wiesel, nor should we be. And we have not all suffered how he and others suffered, and that is a good thing. But we should all keep his messages foremost in our minds and the lessons from that time and place foremost in our minds. There is not now, nor will there ever be, a time to take things like liberty and freedom for granted.
Now, having written a much starker message than I had intended, I promise that next Monday will be more uplifting and not so much of a history and moral lesson.
1 comment:
Personally I love history lessons. I guess moral lessons are good also. . . Very nice post but who are you? We all have to squint to see the initials at the bottom. Oh yeah, that is because I made the font small. Whoops.
I saw some of the pictures that Stephen took of Auschwitz and the one thing that really struck me was how normal it looked. If you didn't know, you'd probably think it was an old factory or something. It seems like someplace where such horrendous things happened should bear the scars of it so deeply that even the air feels different. It is frightening how serene evil can look.
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