This week is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, marking the day 80 years ago when survivors in Auschwitz were liberated
In the spring of 2022, I defended my dissertation. When I was done, I headed straight to the airport to head to Poland and Ukraine to volunteer with Ukrainian refugees fleeing the new-ish war. One of my stops in Poland was at Auschwitz-Birkenau, a place of horrors and “banal” evil. I went without my travel companions, whom I love dearly, but I was grateful for the opportunity to be alone with my thoughts and reflections as I walked through the sites where “Never Again” has such deep meaning.
This week marks the 80th anniversary of the liberation of those camps, semi-hidden deep in the Polish forest. On Jan. 27, 1945, the Red Army, on their march across Poland, came upon the compound of 40-plus concentration and extermination camps that composed the Auschwitz complex. Of the 1.3 million people sent to Auschwitz, 1.1 million died. 1.1 million in less than five years.
General Vasily Petrenko, commander of the 107th Infantry Division, remarked, “I who saw people dying every day was shocked by the Nazis’ indescribable hatred toward the inmates who had turned into living skeletons. I read about the Nazis’ treatment of Jews in various leaflets, but there was nothing about the Nazis’ treatment of women, children, and old men. It was in Auschwitz that I found out about the fate of the Jews.”
Many of the children brought to Auschwitz-Birkenau were murdered upon arrival by being sent to the gas chambers. Some starved to death, died from exposure, or were used as fodder for medical experiments by Dr. Josef Mengele and others. Slightly more than 700 children (of all nationalities) survived until liberation, out of the more than 23,500 children who were registered in the camp. According to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum, in the early period of the existence of the women’s camp, children born there were put to death, regardless of their ethnicity, without being entered in the camp records. Later, some non-Jewish babies were allowed to live.
As I walked through the former death camps, I was struck by how easily some people could normalize killing. SS guards experimented with the most efficient ways to kill people. When they decided that they didn’t like the extra work caused by blood getting on clothing after being shot, they made their prisoners strip before shooting them or sending them to the gas chambers. When the first gas chambers didn’t kill quickly enough, they experimented until they found a poisonous combination that killed them more quickly, thousands at a time.
One has to wonder how non-soldiers also normalized the rounding up and killing of so many people. The guide giving my tour said that local farmers would buy the ashes left by the crematoriums to fertilize their fields. He also pointed out that one of the camp commanders, who seemed to treat shooting people in the head as a boring day job, went home to his family with young children and would take them on picnics like a normal dad. I wonder if his wife ever asked him how his day at work had been.
The ‘banality of genocide’
More than 15 years after the liberation of the camps, and during the 1961 trial for Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, writer and philosopher Hannah Arendt coined the phrase “the banality of evil” to try to put words on the efficient, unemotional, routinized way the Nazi regime killed people.
During the Holocaust, the word “genocide” did not exist. However, Polish lawyer Raphäel Lemkin was outraged, first at the Ottoman destruction of the Armenians during World War I (now known as the Armenian Genocide) and then at the utter depravity of the Holocaust. He coined the term in 1944 in his book “Axis Rule in Occupied Europe.” It consists of the Greek prefix genos, meaning race or tribe, and the Latin suffix cide, meaning killing.
“It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves,” he wrote. “Genocide is directed against the national group as an entity, and the actions involved are directed against individuals, not in their individual capacity, but as members of the national group.” Genocide was first recognized under international law in 1946. In 1948, it was codified by the United Nations and has since been ratified by 153 countries.
Article II of the Genocide Convention defines genocide as having two main elements: a mental one and a physical. The mental element is the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” The physical one includes: killing members of the group, causing serious harm to members of the group, deliberately creating conditions to physically destroy the group, preventing births within the group and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Never forget
The Holocaust was not the only genocide in the 20th and 21st centuries. In addition to the Armenian genocide in WWI and the Holocaust in WWII are the killing fields in Cambodia in the mid-to-late 1970s, the genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina in the early 1990s, the Rwandan genocide in 1994 and an ongoing genocide in Sudan, among others. Today, we see genocide or genocidal actions in Ukraine by Russia and in Sudan, and some accuse Israel of committing genocide in Gaza.
In the spring of 1945, Eisenhower’s tour of the Ohrdruf concentration camp in Germany included encounters with corpses “piled like wood” and “living skeletons” struggling to survive. Immediately, Eisenhower foresaw a day when people would deny these horrors took place.
“Get it all on record now,” Eisenhower allegedly said. “Get the films, get the witnesses, because somewhere down the road of history some (expletive) will get up and say this never happened.”
Genocide does not start with killing. It begins with the “otherizing” of groups, in ways that distinguish “us” from “them,” and then dehumanizing those groups that are not “us.”
I did not need to visit the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camps to know they were unspeakably evil. However, my somber visit embedded in my soul my deep conviction to speak up at injustices and cruelty being perpetuated. All humans have dignity, all humans have basic human rights endowed by their Creator and all deserve to have those rights respected.
I’ll end with a quote from Elie Wiesel, who survived Auschwitz. “We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”
Originally published in the Deseret News
