DON’T LET HATE WIN AGAIN
With intolerance and neo-Nazism on the rise once more, the horror of the Final Solution is painfully relevant today
IN THE glass display case there are pink shorts, a blue dress, beige top, muddy boots. They could be any little girl’s clothes really.
You imagine the child who wore them, perhaps a five-yearold, with bright eyes, full of fun and mischief. You smile.
Then you learn she was one of more than 200,000 children who suffered a horrific end here, clinging to her mother in a dark chamber until Zyklon B gas wrenched the last breath from her innocent life.
Now you feel anger, shock, revulsion. Then sadness and shame and disbelief.
I am in the darkest place on Earth. The largest graveyard in the history of the world. Auschwitz.
There was no rage against the dying of the light in this hell as 1.1million human beings were murdered.
This is where the Final Solution was mercilessly, and clinically, carried out for Hitler. In just seven weeks in the summer of 1944, about 320,000 Hungarian Jews were gassed and their bodies cremated. The only evidence of genocide that remained was ashes, scattered to the wind in the bleak south Polish countryside.
Survivor Dario Gabbai was forced to work in the chambers. He could hear mothers and children screaming and scratching at the walls as the gas rushed through the vents.
Afterwards, he was ordered at gunpoint to clear the bodies. He said: “All I could see was people black and blue from the gas and women still with children in their hands.”
He also recalls SS guards taking sadistic delight in their work. One would visit the crematorium and select seven or eight girls and tell them to undress. Then, in front of the prisoners, he shot them in their breasts or their private parts.
Gabbai’s cousin Morris Venezia, who also survived, said: “No human brain can believe that or understand it. But we saw it.”
We enter Block 11, where Dr Josef Mengele and others did the most horrendous medical experiments on men, women and children, cutting them open with no anaesthetic and poisoning their organs.
In the basement, inmates were starved to death to see how their bodies reacted. Others were put in sealed rooms to slowly suffocate.
In another block, there is more than a ton of human hair in vast containers, cut from the corpses for sale to furniture and textile firms. Over time, the hair has lost its individual colours and is now a ghastly grey.
Out of respect for the dead, it cannot be photographed or conserved. The hair will be allowed to decay until it turns to dust. Looking at it now, in the dim, pallid light, you know the image will be forever seared in your soul.
A note from Chaim Hermann, who died in Auschwitz, to his wife and daughter was found after the liberation of the camp in January 1945.
He wrote: “It is simply hell but Dante’s hell is incomparably ridiculous in comparison with this one here… we are its eyewitnesses and we cannot leave it alive.”
While one million Jews were murdered in Auschwitz, there were other victims including 70,000 Polish political prisoners, more than 20,000 Roma gypsies, 10,000 Soviet prisoners of war, and smaller numbers of homosexuals and Freemasons. The hate was so extreme, the ideology so embedded, that after the war many of the Nazis showed no remorse. Auschwitz commandant Rudolph Hoess lived 60 metres from one of the crematoria with his wife and five young children. Our guide tells us that in the summer, the children picked strawberries from their garden but their mother would be annoyed that she had to wash them as “they were always covered in human ash”.
How did he sleep? Like a baby, it seems. The genocide he waged on his family’s doorstep was just business not personal.
This is a harrowing place but everyone who can find their way here should come.
It stands as a reminder to the world of what can happen when racist and other stereotypes are allowed to fester and develop into hideous ideologies.
The Holocaust happened just seven decades ago yet we see again the parallels between a grim past and chilling present.
UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres said last month: “Neo-Nazis and white supremacy groups are among the main purveyors of extreme hatred. Too often, vile views are moving from the margins to the mainstream. We must stand together against the normalisation of hate.”
Michael Bornstein was a four-year-old when he arrived in Auschwitz. One of the few children to survive, he now lives in the US.
He said: “We went through a lot but we don’t like discrimination, whether it’s against Jews, Muslims, Mexicans.
“They can be subjected to the same kind of discrimination that Jews were in Germany, in Poland, and other European countries. We need to wake up and do something about the discrimination that’s ongoing in the world.”
It won’t be long before Michael and the last survivors of Auschwitz die. Soon, there will be no living witnesses left.
As I walk out of the death camp, I see again that brighteyed little girl with the worn, muddy boots.
Her suffering can never be forgotten. Let us hope the horror she endured paves the way for a more tolerant world.
It is her lasting legacy to humanity and one we must treasure.
No human brain can believe that. But we saw it
SURVIVOR