Just outside the town of Oswiecim in southern Poland, a faint sun shines through the poplars that surround the killing chambers at Auschwitz. It is winter 1995. At the end of the track a few hundred well-bundled souls, many walking with canes, gather around a monument to pray for the dead and grapple with the wounds of their past.
The resonant voice of cantor Moshe Stern pierces the chilly silence as he sings El Moleh Rahamin, “Oh merciful God.”
When he is finished, Auschwitz survivor Elie Wiesel steps to the microphone and declares: “Please, God, do not have mercy on those who created this place.”
“God of forgiveness,” pleads the Nobel Peace Prize winner, “do not forgive those murderers of Jewish children here. Do not forgive the murderers and their accomplices.”
It is January 26th, the day before the 50th anniversary of the camp’s liberation. The ceremony is one of protest, attended mostly by Jews who are against the Polish government’s ceremony planned for the following day. The official commemoration will not include the kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, or acknowledge that most of the camp’s victims were Jews.
Sigmund Sobolewski, a Polish Catholic, has joined the protest. Among the first inmates of Auschwitz, he wears No. 88 on his faded prison stripes and a sandwich-board that proclaims: “We, the Christians, are also guilty of the Holocaust.”
The next day a far larger crowd numbering in the thousands gathers to mark the official anniversary. Wiesel, flanked by Polish President Lech Walesa, walks through the gate that contains the infamous inscription, Arbeit Macht Frei (“Work Shall Make You Free.”) Again, there are speeches.
“Close your eyes, my friends, and listen,” Wiesel urges the crowd.
“Listen to the silent screams of terrified mothers. Listen to the prayers of anguished old men and women. Listen to the tears of children.”
Walesa takes the microphone. His voice has a tremor. “This is a bleak road for all nations,” he says, “but mostly for the Jewish people.”
The last six words have been penned into his manuscript. They were added the previous night when Wiesel persuaded the Polish president to point out that Jews were the main Auschwitz targets.
As this is happening, a third of the world away in Cambridge, Mass., Frieda Tenenbaum and her friends since childhood, Tova Friedman and Rachel Hyams, observe what they call their own 50th birthday. They were among the youngest of Adolf Hitler’s survivors (Frieda was 10, Tova and Rachel were 6 and 7) when they were liberated by Soviet troops Jan. 27, 1945. The soldiers had filed through the same Auschwitz gate the afternoon they saved the three girls and a few other children from death.
The gathering at Frieda’s apartment marks their first reunion in 10 years. At 6 p.m., they flip on the television and watch as elite Polish guards lay wreathes on the monument. It didn’t mean much to them, they decide. They wonder whether the world ever will understand what that place was all about.
I had made my own pilgrimage the year before. The sky was gray as steel and a brisk wind slapped my face when I passed through the gate. I wanted to see for myself what Auschwitz was all about. I followed the path next to the railroad line that once brought prisoners into the camp. Ahead marched a group of seven or eight young adults, one holding an Israeli flag.
I passed the spot where Dr. Josef Mengele–the “Angel of Death”–had selected the new arrivals as they were herded out of the cattle cars: a motion to the left meant the gas chambers; right meant slave labor. Then I passed the women’s camp on my left and on my right the kinderlager, the children’s camp.
All that remained of the barracks were rows of spindly brick chimneys, mute testimony to the horrors of this place, ersatz tombstones in a vast and nameless graveyard.
Eventually, I made my way to the west end of the main camp. At the end of the tracks stood a monument flanked by broken slabs of concrete–the remains of Crematoria II and III–just as they were when the retreating Nazis blew them up. I walked over to the monument where the marble plaques in 19 languages lined the base. I found one in English. It read:
Forever let this place be
a cry of despair
and a warning to humanity
where the Nazis murdered
about one and a half million
men, women and children,
mainly Jews
from various countries
of Europe,
Auschwitz-Birkenau
1940-1945
After finding some wild flowers to place on the monument, I followed a short path to the remains of Crematorium II and descended the stairs into the undressing room. Numbness closed in on me like a fist when I imagined my friends Tova and Rachel standing under the fake shower heads wrapped in their towels. I imagined the SS guard at the iron door flipping furiously through the papers on his clipboard looking for their numbers. I could hear his shouts: “Darouse!” “Get them out! Wrong block!”
Next to where the storehouses once stood (the prisoners dubbed them “Canada,” because they imagined Canada to be a country of great wealth), a marble plaque at the ruins of Crematorium IV caught my eye. It told how the ovens were blown up by the Sonderkommando, Jewish prisoners who had been forced to empty the gas chambers and feed the corpses to the fire.
I thought of the heroic victim Roza Robota, and her fellow prisoners, who had smuggled in the dynamite, and Roza’s last words, in Hebrew: “Be strong, have courage!” as an SS guard lowered a rope around her neck. The plaque noted the date of the revolt: Oct. 7, 1944.
I glanced at the digital calendar on my watch: OCT 7. It was 50 years ago to the day that Frieda and her mother had descended the stairs where I now stood and heard the explosion that sent them back to ther barracks.
In my mind’s eye, all we have learned comes flooding back. “Work Shall Make You Free.” The musicians playing as new prisoners are brought in. Hundreds of women and children being led to the showers. The crying. The prayers. I see a pile of hair, young girls’ braids and women’s bouffants, brown, blond, black, red. I see a room full of suitcases scrawled with family names.
Were the maiden names of my friends–Grossman or Tenenbaum or Greenspan–among them?
I see Rudolf Hoess, the camp’s commandant, holding back emotions as his SS underlings rip children from screaming mothers. Oddly, I think of novelist William Styron’s portrayal of him in “Sophie’s Choice” as an affectionate father and family man forced into bestial conduct out of fear of not following his superiors’ orders.
How can such a thing like Auschwitz happen?
During the televised ceremony a year later, Sigmund Sobolewski, No. 88, watched as the elite Polish guard placed their wreathes on the monument. He wore the same sandwich board as the day before with the words, “We, the Christians, are also guilty of the Holocaust.”
As a Christian myself, I feel shame. The people who gathered with all the dignitaries at the monument for the official commemoration knew what happened at Auschwitz, but can they tell why? In my own quest, I find only omens, not answers, a few forgotten relics from history’s trash heap: a silver plate engraved in 1160 and discovered at a German convent, depicting Jews marching into an oven. The Latin inscription around the rim reads: “Because she rejects Christ, the synagogue deserves hell.”
I find a sermon Martin Luther preached in 1543 instructing how Jews, the Christ killers, should be treated: “First, their synagogues shall be set on fire, and whatever does not burn shall be covered with dirt.”
I come upon an account of the 300th anniversary of the Passion play at Oberammergau, Germany, in 1934, implicating Jews in the Crucifixion, which became a showcase for the Nazis’ anti-Semitic campaign. Of the play’s 10 major actors, nine were Nazis; the exception was the actor playing Judas.
A half-century after the war, I see the Star of David and the word “Jude” scrawled on the storefront in Tomaszow-Mazowiecki, the hometown of my three friends in Poland. I ask the owner of a restaurant off the main square if any Jews are left in Tomaszow, and he dismisses the notion with a wave of his hand.
Why Auschwitz?
We look for answers but they are fragmentary and incomplete. They don’t satisfy and probably never will. My friends Tova and Frieda and Rachel were among the handful of children who survived Hitler’s most notorious death camp.
They can’t tell why Auschwitz happened either.
Yet they can tell us what happened and perhaps that is enough. The living can speak for the dead. To turn away, unhearing, is to kill them a second time. But to listen is to confront the monster that lurks deep in the human soul.
