First Lady, at Auschwitz, Cites Holocaust ‘Evil’
Hillary Rodham Clinton, touring the death camps of Auschwitz on Tuesday, called the Holocaust a result of “cold, rational evil.”
“The lessons of this place should never be forgotten,” the first lady said while standing outside a barracks that housed some of the 1.5 million people killed by the Nazis at Auschwitz.
Visibly shaken, she viewed ghastly exhibits of human hair, shoes and clothing left behind by Adolf Hitler’s victims.
Asked to put her feelings into words, she shook her head, shrugged and said: “I just can’t. It’s overwhelming.”
She said the intolerance that led to the World War II extermination of Jews still exists, though on a smaller scale. As examples, she cited “ethnic cleansing” in the former Yugoslav federation and “the church burnings in our own South.”
The first lady toured the site for two hours with Poland’s first lady, Jolanta Kwasniewski, on the second day of a seven-nation European trip designed to promote new freedoms in the former Soviet bloc.
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