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AUSCHWITZ, Poland—Many Europeans, especially Germans, delude themselves and say that the Holocaust—the systematic massacre of Jews and other minorities in World War II—did not happen.
But it did. I, together with my students and headmaster, visited Auschwitz-Birkenau last year in preparation for the 70th year of the Pogram night (Kristallnacht). Accompanied by the mayor of Butzbach, a small town in the state of Hesse, we saw the evidence of terror of the Nazis between 1933 and 1945 in Europe. And what we saw paralyzed us—with horror.
The bones of the murdered people prove that the Holocaust story is not a conspiracy of the Allied nations to destroy Hitler’s reputation. Those who deny the Holocaust and who prefer to call themselves Holocaust revisionists should go to Auschwitz and open and change their minds. They shouldn’t spread lies anymore.
Filipinos also suffered in the last war. They suffered the brutality of the Japanese occupation but some mounted a remarkably effective resistance to the Japanese occupation.
In contrast, the Germans were systematically brainwashed by the Nazi ideology. Those who were considered to be a threat to the Third Reich were either sent to a concentration camp or to an extermination camp.
Reaching the camps, the Jews and those who opposed the Nazis were separated from their families, were isolated, selected, and killed. Most importantly, the move from anti-Semitic policy of discrimination to that of physical damage began in November 1938—the Kristallnacht—and continued until the end of World War II.
That November Pogrom night (Kristallnacht) this autumn in Germany and Austria changed the nature of persecution from economic, political, and social destruction to the physical extermination with beatings, incarceration, and murder; the event is often referred to as the beginning of the Holocaust. In the words of historian Max Rein in 1988, “Kristallnacht came…and everything was changed,” she said.
There are exhibitions to commemorate the anniversary of that dark night.
An exhibition in another complex in Auschwitz-Birkenau showed pictures of the victims while dancing, smoking, playing, simply enjoying their spare time. The terrible thing about the pictures is the gap—nothing revealed that that their lives would soon end.
In 1942, the Nazi-Germany finally decided in a conference in Wannsee near Berlin on the “Final Solution of the Jews´s problem.” Soon after that, Jews in Germany and in German-occupied countries were murdered in Auschwitz.
The Auschwitz-Birkenau museum did not show prisoners, or suffering.
“The people were very merry posing for the camera—in wedding pictures, baptisms, and portraits. Afterward they were pulled out from their normal, beautiful, daily life!” exclaimed one of my students, Antonio Tacke.
The merry faces in the photos are the most terrible things that I have seen. Knowing that these people were killed thereafter in the gas chambers and their corpses thrown in incinerators made it difficult for me to look at the pictures. Who has the right to decide over people’s lives?
My students mourned for the dead, feeling both compassion and fear. They were shocked and deeply affected that regular people like themselves had to suffer social exclusion, deportation, and finally death.
For my students, I asked: Did the Germans really learn from its history?
Auschwitz-Birkenau became the killing center where the largest number of European Jews was killed during the Holocaust. After an experimental gassing of 850 malnourished and ill prisoners in September 1941, mass murder there became a daily routine. By mid 1942, mass gassing of Jews using Zyklon-B began at Auschwitz, where extermination was conducted on an industrial scale with some estimates running as high as 1.5 million people eventually killed through gassing, starvation, disease, shooting, and burning. While most were Jews, there were also gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and prisoners of all nationalities (e.g. Slavic races) who died in the gas chambers.
Children were also often killed upon arrival at Auschwitz. Children born in the camp were generally killed on the spot. Near the end of the war, in order to cut expenses and save gas, cost considerations led to an order to place living children directly into the ovens or throw them into open burning pits. So called camp doctors like Josef Mengele, with the help of his wife, had tortured and inflicted incredible suffering on Jewish children, gypsy children, and many others.
Patients were ordered into pressure chambers, tested with drugs, castrated, frozen to death, and exposed to various other traumas. Mengele also did a number of studies on twins, who were usually murdered and their bodies dissected in experiments.
The major death camps, all in Poland, were Auschwitz II (Birkenau), Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor, and Treblinka. At its peak, Birkenau, the most notorious of all the extermination camps, housed over 100,000 people. At one time, each of the five gas chambers accommodated 2,000 victims. In a day, 12,000 could be gassed and incinerated. Some able-bodied inmates initially were used in industrial slave labor battalions or in the task of genocide itself until they were virtually worked to death or knew too much and needed to be silenced.
Indeed, few victims are on record to ever have escaped or outlive these horror centers.
In addition to the six major extermination centers where most western and central European Jews were murdered, the Nazis also employed Einsatzgruppen—mobile killing units in eastern Europe. According to the historian Raul Hilberg, these mobile killing units were responsible for the murder of 1.4 million east European Jews between 1941 and the end of the war, May 1945.
My students had no words to express their feelings in view of the extent of the cruelty. They could only express hope, that this may never happen again.
