All should heed observance at Auschwitz
Last week’s observance of the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp in southern Poland should touch every human heart.
From 1940 until the camp’s liberation in early 1945, more than 1.1 million people were killed at Auschwitz.
The majority of those slaughtered were Jews, but the victims included other targets of German dictator Adolf Hitler’s hatred: Poles (whom the Nazis also considered “racially inferior” to the “master” German race), Roma (Gypsies) and homosexuals.
If those victims could speak to us today, what would they say?
We know what one said, perhaps speaking for them all.
An elderly French inmate of Auschwitz urged Olga Lengyel, a Hungarian Roma, to observe everything that was happening at the Nazi death camp.
“When the war is over the world must know about this,” she told Lengyel. “It must know the truth.”
Lengyel, who died of cancer in New York in 2001, did so in her memoir, “Five Chimneys: A Woman Survivor’s True Story of Auschwitz.”
The dehumanization of those imprisoned and killed at the camp was nearly complete.
They were lied to about where they were going and why.
They were often treated as animals.
As Lengyel related in her book, 96 men, women and children — including her, her husband and their two sons — were crammed into a cattle car built for eight horses.
Trapped in that car for seven days and eight nights on a trip from Hungary to Poland, they were given little water, no place to relieve themselves, and were forced to travel with the corpses of those who died along the way.
Their valuables — jewelry, watches, pens, even eyeglasses — were taken from them.
The old and infirm were lined up and shot or shuttled into gas chambers.
Those considered fit enough to help the Nazi war effort were lied to again. A sign on the path into Auschwitz’s work camp read, “Arbeit Macht Frei,” or “work sets you free.”
Their heads were shaven. They were hosed down.
They were tattooed with numbers and told that the numbers just stamped into their flesh were now their names.
The depravity of the Nazi program — its categorization of some groups of human beings as both “other” and less than human — is difficult to accept. Facing the truth behind it, mankind’s ability to sink that low, remains as challenging and necessary as it was at the end of World War II.
We live in an age of rising anti-Semitism both here in the United States and across Europe.
That’s clear from the attacks at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018 to last year’s assaults on Jews in New Jersey and New York.
In a recent survey of European Jews, 40% said they live in daily fear of being physically attacked.
And the need to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive is equally clear, with a 2018 survey finding that a shocking 41% of Americans and 66% of millennials didn’t know about the Auschwitz death camp, and 22% of millennials said they hadn’t even heard of the Holocaust.
This week’s anniversary is a painful reminder of the depth and breadth of human cruelty.
We can never say “never forget” too many times.
It’s all too clear that we must use the spring of memory to replenish the well of compassion.
— Pittsburgh Post-Gazette The state’s gun problem
It is easy to paint any issue in pure, unyielding black and white. Abortion. Environment. Poverty. Health care. Energy. Immigration. Taxes. Everything can boil down to pro or con.
But is that accurate? Almost never.
Let’s look at guns. Pennsylvania is often tagged as a gun-friendly state. It’s hard to forget Barack Obama saying in the 2008 presidential campaign that “bitter” people in former industrial towns decimated by job losses “cling to guns or religion.” Someone in Seattle might think every Pennsylvanian has an arsenal. It’s just not true.
Pennsylvania is a state where hunting is a sport and a tradition and a way to fill the freezer for a year’s worth of eating. It’s a state with one of the most forcefully worded statements on gun rights woven into its constitution. It’s a state where gun owners take those rights seriously.
But it’s also a state where people feel differently. Pittsburgh’s mayor is defending an incredibly controversial package of laws that would limit ownership of specific weapons and regulate the ability of certain people to have guns. That package was born in the aftermath of the most deadly antiSemitic attack in U.S. history, at Squirrel Hill’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018.
It is not right or fair to tar the state as one thing or another. It isn’t right or fair to do the same to gun owners or gun control advocates, either.
On a recent Monday in Homewood, the Church of the Holy Cross Episcopal ran out of money buying back guns in a no-questions-asked event aimed at taking weapons off the streets. Rifles, pistols, even two AR-15s were surrendered. A total of 145 weapons were taken in, some given up even after the money was gone.
On the same day, in Virginia, a crowd of thousands demonstrated peacefully, despite worries that violence would erupt, in opposition to plans for that state’s leadership to pass gun-control legislation.
The gun owners didn’t get violent. The people giving up their guns didn’t just do it for money. It was more complicated.
There is a rainbow of gray in an issue like gun control, and that should be more of a focus because it means buy-in from both sides. It’s seen in support for more cooperation between agencies that would better enforce existing gun laws and enhance background checks.
Important issues are never black and white. It’s not fair to paint them that way.
— Pittsburgh Tribune-Review