Searching for the moral at Europe's heart of darkness
The small Polish town of Oswiecim is a train ride from Katowice. The Second World War's most notorious death camp, Birkenau, or Auschwitz II, is in the village of Brzezinka, just under two miles away.
Now Auschwitz, the most famous of all the Nazi concentration camps, has become a bit of a must-see for political tourists. It must be political because all the politicians go there. In 2005, to celebrate 60 years of the end of World War II, no less than 30 of them did, including World President Bush and the Russian Tsar, Putin, Prime Minister Blair, and the Emperor of France.
You enter through the famous wrought-iron gates with their promise “Arbeit Macht Frei” (Through Work, Freedom) to a kind of alternative Disney World of horror. Here is the “Book of Deaths” in which names of victims are faithfully recorded alongside, at approximately 5-minute intervals, with fictitious causes. Here are the shower-rooms that never saw any water, only deadly “Zyklon B” delivered to the naked prisoners through the fake shower-heads. (The nakedness saved time later.) Here are the incineration ovens, and here the ponds filled with human ashes...
Everyone agrees it's chilling... sobering. No fun. No Holiday.
But there's not much agreement on just what the lesson is.
Some people seem to think the lesson is: don't vote for anyone with a toothbrush moustache and a swastika armband. If that is the lesson, it has been well learned. Some (more aware) people think that no government should construct gas chambers and extermination ovens to incinerate thousands of people, trucked in cattle wagons from surrounding countries. Again, if that is the lesson, it has been well learned. No government since World War II has even proposed such a program, let alone started to implement one.
But if that is the lesson, it is also rather a limited one. I would like to think the lesson was more general, about our common humanity. About what happens when communities divide along racial or religious lines. And that makes Auschwitz still carry a political lesson.
Yet if the lesson is about our common humanity, then it is one that has evidently not been learned. This may have something to do with the way that we have “simplified” this issue into one that concerns only the Jewish people. In fact, the Holocaust was a multi-dimensional, multicultural act of barbarity.
Take Frank Dimant, working for the Jewish Tribune (Canada). First of all, he describes the reaction of the first ever Canadian Prime Minister to visit the “Auschwitz Experience:”
The emotion that overcame Jean Chrétien and his wife llene was evident. He was pale-faced and shaken as he listened to the description of the killing machine and stood in silent reverence as a tour guide described in detail the amount of Jewish bodies that could be burnt on any given day in Auschwitz and Birkenau.
And this, says Dimant, brings us to the question of what is the lesson for today.
Is it sufficient to join us in shedding a tear at Auschwitz? Is it sufficient to believe that a multi-cultural society in Canada is the answer to anti-Semitism domestically and internationally? I believe not! The lesson that must be fully absorbed by Mr. Jean Chrétien as well as by all Canadian Cabinet ministers and specifically the bureaucrats in Foreign Affairs, is that in 1999 there are still elements in the world that are prepared to use the equivalent of Zyklon B gas on the Jewish people. In 1999, there are still states, which tolerate and encourage stereotypic images of Jews, and all the ugly features associated with the caricatures of the Jews, to flourish in their newspapers. And it is incumbent to remember that in 1999, there are elements who still speak of the final destruction of the Jewish people vis-à-vis the State of Israel... We will look to the Security Council and to Canadian Ambassador Fowler's hand as he raises it to cast the vote over and over again on matters relating to the security and safety of the State of Israel. This will be the test of the lesson of Auschwitz.
Not at all, the Nazis did not build any of the camps solely for Jewish people, they were very inclusive in that sense. Just as they treated men, women and children the same. Auschwitz was originally mainly intended for Poles (which is why it is in Poland) and was only designated in the middle of the war (1941) for the final solution to the “Jewish problem.” Jews (and the complicated criteria used to measure “jewishness” was part of the madness) made up the bulk of the victims, but once categorized, the only distinction made between prisoners was the color of badges they wore. Jews had the yellow star, political prisoners wore a red triangle. Gypsies got black triangles, homosexuals pink ones; miscellaneous criminals green ones. Jehovah's Witnesses even had a special color—purple. But they were all worked to death, or exterminated. The mentality of the Nazis cannot be understood if you think of it as simply the Führer's personal antipathy to Jews.
Yet if the lesson of Auschwitz is of man's inhumanity to man, of the consequences once you place individuals into categories and refuse to remember they are also people, then that lesson has not been learned at all.
In the aftermath of the horrors of the Nazi camps, the world pledged ‘never again’. Today, co-opting the holocaust for narrow political purposes, let alone tourist ones, risks (at the least) ‘holocaust fatigue’ setting in, and at worst, its universal significance being lost.