REVISITING THE INGLORIOUS PAST
One of Adolf Hitler’s biggest concentration camps, Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland stands as a mirror to the horrible past, which even today, reminds us of what evil humans can do
Sometime in the late 1980s, when I was in school, our class was introduced to Escape from Sobibor (1987), a disturbingly real film about the Nazi atrocities on the inmates of the Sobibor extermination camp in Poland. It was my first visual experience of understanding what Hitler’s forces had done to Europe’s Jews. Sobibor, unlike most other German concentration camps built during World War II, was meant purely for extermination. Anybody, who was taken there, was led straight to the gas chambers to be poisoned by carbon monoxide (Zyklon B was introduced later), and the corpses would then be sent to mass graves or were cremated in open air. The images from Escape from Sobibor would haunt me and my friends for a long time.
The thing is, childhood memories never really go away; they are merely relegated to some corner of the brain only to come to the top following some contextual trigger. And so it happened with me during our visit to the AuschwitzBirkenau concentration camps in southern Poland. Both are now part of a memorial and museum complex that take in thousands of visitors each day to remind us what evil human beings are capable of. There are no accurate numbers, but historians put the number of people killed at Auschwitz at anywhere between 1.1 million and 1.5 million, with more than 90% being Jews.
There is a reason why
Auschwitz became the most visible symbol of Hitler’s ‘Final Solution’ — a stateenacted policy of extermination of Jews, and it has to do with geography. Much of Poland lies bang in the centre of Europe, and it became the most convenient place for the Nazis to transport Jews, the Roma people, Russian prisoners of war, and anyone they wanted to exterminate from anywhere else on the continent. So “successful” was Auschwitz, that its founder, commandant Rudolf Hoess, opened two satellite camps nearby at Birkenau and Monowitz house with respectively 10,000 and 12,000 inmates. In all, the Germans built 24 main concentration camps, resulting in the deaths of up to six million Jews.
This systematic segregation, discrimination and extermination eventually came to be known as The Holocaust, from the Greek word meaning whole burnt offering.
All around the complex, you can see why this was called by that name.
Only a few barracks are open for public viewing, and they are disturbing not just because of the number of people who were put here in the harshest of conditions, but also because of the way they were killed. The Indian Partition of 1947, the most traumatic period of postindependence Indian history, had similar stories of humans becoming monsters.
Over the course of the extermination, the Germans realised that shooting people dead and then burying them was time-consuming and it delayed Hitler’s aim of taking over the world. So, they resorted to gassing the Jews and other inmates. This, too, could not keep pace with the number of nmates being transported to the concentration camps.
In what could only be ermed as the macabre and sordid ingenuity of the Nazis, Hoess’ deputy Karl Fritzsch came up with an idea that was even more efficient — round them up in inescapable gas chambers and then send Zyklon B gas through the pipes using sealed canisters. Zyklon B was a cyanidebased pesticide invented by the Germans in the 1920s, but used by the Nazis to kill over a million in their gas chambers. The first time Zyklon B was used in a gas chamber was in September 1941, and it killed 850 inmates in a basement in Block 11 at Auschwitz. This building was found unsuitable, and therefore, they decided to take the inmates to one of the two large crematoriums. Here, they could kill 700 people at once. German efficiency could not be more evil.
Many of the people killed were photographed, and their belongings taken away for use by the Germans. Inside the Auschwitz memorial and museum, you will see the haunting photographs of the victims, along with hundreds of their preserved shoes, bags, jewellery, bathroom equipment, combs and even human hair. So systematic and organised were the Nazis that they documented every little detail of their “human inventory”. It is this record of events that shows how the Germans were focused on a singular aim — to rid the world of Jews, no matter what. They repeated this first in Birkenau or Auschwitz II, just three kilometres from the first Auschwitz camp and then, at Monowitz or Auschwitz III. It would be years of unspeakable evil before the war came to end in 1945.
To write about Auschwitz is as traumatic as the experience of walking around the complex. It is a part of human history that exposes the worst in us. But, it is also a part of history that cannot and should not be forgotten, for, as Spanish philosopher George Santyana once said, “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” This is not lost on those who visit Auschwitz as this quote is what welcomes everyone the memorial.