Honoring Tree of Life victims, at Auschwitz
Gov. Wolf travels to Poland, lays wreath
OSWIECIM, Poland — About 5,500 people were killed along the courtyard execution wall. Most of them were shot naked, their hands tied behind their backs. Occasionally, someone asked to take a bullet facing forward.
Many of them were Polish political prisoners taken by the Nazis during World War II. Some were leaders of clandestine organizations. Some tried to help people escape the country.
Together, they represent a small portion of the 1.1 million people murdered at the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination and concentration camps.
It was here, in front of the replica of the wall where they were executed, that Gov. Tom Wolf placed a green wreath with blue and yellow flowers and a ribbon honoring the victims of the Tree of Life synagogue shooting.
They are now intertwined: The victims of the worst anti-Semitic attack in U.S. history and the victims of the world’s most notorious Jewish genocide.
“I just wanted to pay tribute and remember them,” Mr. Wolf said later in the afternoon, after he completed an emotional, roughly three-and-a-half hour tour of the complexes.
It has been 322 days since the shooting that killed 11 worshippers at the synagogue. It was a day the governor openly calls his most difficult in office.
With the one-year anniversary approaching, Mr. Wolf sees
lessons here in Poland for the people back home.
“We cannot allow ourselves to descend to this kind of behavior,” he said. “We cannot do it.”
The workers at Auschwitz-Birkenau hope that opening the former camps up to tours, like the one the governor completed Saturday, will help people avoid the horrors of the past.
Hard to digest
The lessons learned here, the workers caution, can be hard to digest.
“This is a very complicated story,” said Pawel Sawicki, a press officer and tour guide at AuschwitzBirkenau. “Something that is also very hard to understand here is that Auschwitz is a human story when you look at two groups of people.”
It’s natural, he said, to empathize with the victims and mourn their deaths. “A much more difficult lesson when we talk about the humanity in Auschwitz is that this place was committed by people. That the perpetrators, people in uniforms who run this place, were people like you and me, were fathers, husbands and sons and mothers and wives and daughters, and they lived normal lives.”
Even in a physical sense, Auschwitz is full of contrasts.
Next to the execution wall is a brick building that on its outside would look beautiful under other circumstances. On one side of the building is a walkway lined with picturesque poplar trees. But on many of the other sides are wire fences, a reminder of entrapment.
The complex is full of dark, horrifying stories of murder by heart injection, of gynecological experiments in sterilization, of hospitals where there was no medical treatment, of deadly marches and starvation. All were motivated by a belief that Germans were superior and anyone who did not fit their description — be they Jews, Roma, rebel Poles or others — should be eliminated.
It was the result of a yearslong process that began with prejudice and escalated over time into an ideology that resulted in genocide.
“There is only one species on this planet capable of such rationality,” Mr. Sawicki said.
Inside the camps, there are also stories of hope. One man took another’s place in execution and was later declared a saint. About 200 people managed to escape. About 7,000 survived long enough to see Soviet forces liberate the camp on Jan. 27, 1945.
And then there are stories in which hope was weaponized. About 900,000 Jews were murdered in gas chambers almost immediately after their arrival. The German S.S. officers instructed them to write their names on their bags so that they could find them later. The officers told them to remember their assigned numbers and shower quickly. Coffee would be waiting on the other side. But they never made it there.
Of course, there are the stories that never will be fully known.
“There is a huge gap, a huge void of darkness because those people who touched the ultimate, suffering, starvation, pain, they didn’t survive,” Mr. Sawicki said. “We will never be able to tell the story of the gas chambers because we have no testimony of someone who was inside there.”
Eleven names
After he placed the wreath next to the execution wall, Mr. Wolf walked past the buildings that held exhibits he had visited earlier in the day. There were piles of eyeglasses. There were cosmetic cases and kitchenware. There was a room with more than two tons of human hair, bunched and piled up.
“The hair was cut and sold,” Mr. Sawicki said. “In this system, nothing is wasted.”
The governor walked past the gallows and later into a building that had been converted into a gas chamber and crematorium. Inside his right suit pocket was the pink mezuzah that hung above Rabbi Jeffrey Myers’ door in the Tree of Life synagogue. It broke when SWAT officers entered the building, hoping to rescue those inside.
When Mr. Wolf emerged from the cold, gray building, a large book with pristine white pages was awaiting him. On a fresh sheet, just after a message from the minister of justice of Taiwan, Mr. Wolf inscribed a note of his own. The state mourns, he wrote. “We mourn for these victims, and we mourn for their families.”
And then, one by one, he etched 11 names in black ink, with a note: “We will remember them.”
A candle in memory
After he finished his time in the first section of Auschwitz, the governor and his staffers drove to nearby Auschwitz IIBirkenau, one of multiple expansions designed by the Germans as they prepared for an additional shipment of prisoners.
When it was created, the first gas chambers were placed behind a line of trees. Little White House and Little Red House, they were called.
“They did not see extermination,” Mr. Sawicki said of the people in the camp.
But that changed roughly a year later.
In the spring of 1944, S.S. officers were preparing for a delivery of as many as 800,000 people. Germany was losing the war, and gas was limited. So, they built a railway into the new Birkenau section.
“This is the final upgrade of the extermination system,” Mr. Sawicki said. “This is, for me, the most disturbing place.”
It’s where people were separated and “real doctors sentence them to death because they believe in this ideology,” Mr. Sawicki said.
Those who didn’t go to a gas chamber lived in barracks where the wooden beds were piled three levels high, like morbid bunk beds. Four to seven people shared each level. Disease and lice spread.
The others — the bulk of the people who arrived — went to a gas chamber. Historians have estimated that it took about 30 minutes, based in part on the amount of time it took for the screaming to stop.
Sometimes, the bodies were piled high, a sign that people had climbed over one another as they tried to gasp the last breath of fresh air.
When people take Mr. Sawicki’s tour, they sometimes ask why people didn’t do more to stop the killings.
“I usually ask, ‘Are we better indeed?’” Mr. Sawicki said. “We are bystanders, and we look at different things happening right now.”
That thought spinning freshly before him, the governor took a candle, lit in memory of the Tree of Life victims, and placed it on a memorial near the ruins of a gas chamber.
He said afterward: “I think you have to see this to begin to understand this kind of incredible evil happened in our world.”
‘We cannot allow ourselves to descend to this kind of behavior. We cannot do it.’ — Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf, while visiting Auschwitz