Never Forget, Never Forget : Vigilance demands that the word Auschwitz remain underlined in history

Years ago a survivor of Nazi Germany’s concentration camps wrote a book about the meaning and organization of that vast and indescribably terrible system. He titled it “The Theory and Practice of Hell.” No words more aptly describe the deliberate process of brutalization, humiliation, dehumanization and murder that claimed millions of victims and that will forever stand as one of the darkest chapters in human history.

Half a century ago exactly, a shocked world got its first direct look at the incomprehensible horrors of that system when the Soviet army liberated Auschwitz-Birkenau, one of the Nazi death camps. Of the millions who had been transported to that complex in southern Poland, a pitiful remnant of about 7,600 were still alive.

Rudolf Hoss, the camp’s first commandant, who after the Allied victory was to be tried and executed for his crimes, confessed that he “personally arranged the gassing of 2 million persons between June-July 1941 and the end of 1943.” Many more were to die before the camp was liberated. About 90% of the victims were Jews, seized by German forces from all over Europe and marked for death solely on the basis of the Nazis’ maniacal ideology.

This week at Auschwitz--Oswiecim in Polish--solemn services were conducted in the shadow of the gas chambers and crematories that have come to symbolize the enormous killing machine built by Hitler and his followers. The observance was not wholly free from some of the tensions that have long existed between the Polish government and Jewish organizations and individuals. Anti-Semitism was a powerful force in Poland in the prewar years and did not disappear in the war’s aftermath, and questions about the sensitivity of Poles to the suffering of their Jewish fellow citizens continue to be argued.

Nonetheless there was a coming together to honor and mourn the multitudinous victims of Nazism and to share the common pain of loss. Auschwitz will forever be emblematic of the evil that men and the systems they create are capable of committing. The common responsibility of mankind is never to forget what happened there, or why.