When one talks of the Holocaust or the Shoah, the black&white film Schindler's List now starts to play in one's mind. Or if you have been to the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC, it is that railway car and what spills out of it that spears your mind's eye. For those who have physically visited such places as Buchenwald, the air still oppresses with a miasma after sixty years.
Facts come rolling off the tongue like six million Jews murdered. Another five to six million others were also murdered; homosexuals, Gypsies, ministers, activists, and even American servicemen are counted in that number. At the Holocaust Museum one is introduced to the mind-numbing realization of how much an industry death in Nazi Germany was with over 600 camps of various sizes scattered throughout the Third Reich.
And then you read that what you knew is not even the full story. Tucked into a quiet town in Germany are the records of Hell on Earth. Six buildings, under the auspices of the International Red Cross in Bad Arolsen, have quietly held the most detailed look into the death machine that was Nazi Germany's concentration camps. No there were not 'only 600' such camps, think over 20,000 of various sizes and varying cruelty. There is probably graphic depictions of the Dora underground facility tucked away there, detailing how many people had to die to build one V-2 rocket. That over 17 million people were put into these camps; of that number some 12 million were worked to death or simply gassed if they were lucky, some poor souls became medical experiments.
One description from a Russian imprisoned in one of those camps reads like a scene from Alexander Nevsky. Of Jews being thrown alive into the flames. Little children being murdered. Of gutters flowing red with Jewish blood, blood the same color as their murderers. To poleaxe the reader there in one document is the name Frank, Annelise; Anne Frank was just a statistic in the Nazi bureaucracy of death.
Only now are these documents perhaps coming to public light after being sheltered for decades by bureacracies and their rules. One has to wonder if the likes of John Demjanjuk would have made it into the United States to hide for decades from his crimes if these files had been more widely known earlier? Maybe just maybe a full accounting of this gross atrocity can be realized when each country that has equal control over these records decide to release them to the public.
3 comments:
I went to see Dachau, the first concentration camp, outside Munich.
40 years after it was closed the sense of evil and horror was still palpable. I was with a group of about half a dozen, no one else there. We reached the site of one of the crematoriums when a large bell nearby began to toll. All we could do is stand and look out over the scene of what was the camp. It was spooky.
I challenge anyone who has any confusion at all about the nature of evil in the world and the conduct of the US in places like Abu Ghraib or Gitmo to go to a place like that and get some perspective.
Obviously the lefties haven't been. Did you see the comments that I linked to which Conservative Intelligence Review found at the Huffington Post where they wanted to reopen Auschwitz and gas Senator Lieberman for supporting the Iraq war?
I saw what you posted in regards to Leiberman. Just sick. They would engage in a replay of the Final Solution to silence a troublesome man. What does that remind me of also from history? Oh, Sir Thomas Becket.
Thus wrought the state that did raise these people with too much self esteem and not enough critical thinking.
Chilling even to think about it.
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