Courage and resilience, still alive after 80 years.
In the intolerable biting cold of this year's Winter, King Charles III along with dozens of world leaders had paid their visit to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the Auschwitz Concentration Camp in southern Poland. A handful of decrepit survivors of that concentration camp had also joined them. Auschwitz stood as the witness to the murder of 1.1 million people, among whom mostly were Jews. Near a former gas chamber and a crematory in the Polish town of Oswiecim, the formal and dignified ceremony took place. The name Oswiecim was translated into German as "Auschwitz" during the German occupation of Poland from 1939 to '45. The Auschwitz survivors, who numbered thousands at the end of the war, had died mostly. Only a few remaining ones had gathered at the ceremony and placed lit candles on the Wall of Death. On one side of this wall, there was a building inside which during those days the SS doctors used to run fatal and sexually sadistic experiments on the female prisoners. In another nearby building, the members of the Polish resistance fighters and male prisoners were tortured and killed. On the walls of that building the bullet holes remained fresh. On the other side of the courtyard there stood another building where in the September of 1941, the Nazi scientists had tasted the cyanide-based pesticide Zyklon - B, originally invented in Germany, that was later used in gas chambers for the mass killing of the prisoners that became infamous as "The Holocaust" in history. The very old camp survivors in their decrepit health, supported by the family members stood silently in front of the Wall of Death. Andrzej Duda, the President of Poland, and Piotr Cywinski, the Director of the Auschwitz and Birkenau Museum had joined the survivors. Both of them had crossed themselves in front of the line of wreaths made of red and white roses. The Auschwitz museum flags with blue and white stripes were flying on the row of flag poles fixed on the wall. The flag was designed after the same motif uniforms the concentration camp prisoners had to wear before they were either sent to the gas chamber for immediate death or to the factories outside the camp to work.
The President of the World Jewish Congress and the Chairman of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial Foundation, Ronald S. Lauder said in an interview, "This is the most important anniversary we are going to have because of the shrinking number of survivors and because of what is happening in the world today. We thought the virus of anti - Semitism was dead, but it was just in hiding." Fewer than 50 survivors had attended the somber ceremony, whereas almost two times the number had attended the 75th anniversary of Auschwitz. Addressing the dwindling number of survivors, Ronald said, "In five years there will be very few left, and those who are still alive won't have the energy to go." Hopefully, the number of foreign visitors has increased. Among the row of foreign dignitaries, this year eight kings and queens were present in the ceremony.
Rise of neo-Nazism
Olaf Scholz, the departing Chancellor of Germany, and the German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier were among the foreign guests. Scholz, his likely successor Friedrich Merz, and other politicians had been scrambling to manage some positive responses for a new political party AfD (Alternative for Germany), a hard right-wing party, a month before the German general election. AfD was being seen as an attempt to return to those days of German nationalism that had paved the way for Hitler and his Nationalist Party's rise in the 1930s. Very recently in a political rally, the AfD leaders and the US industrialist Elon Musk together, had said in their joint address to the people of unified Germany, that they should not feel ashamed or guilty about the holocaust and other Nazi-era crimes that their predecessors had committed. The rallyists were shouting for a "Great Germany". Addressing this new movement, the Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk had said, "sounded all too familiar and ominous especially only hours before the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz." As part of the program, the house where the Nazi commandant of Auschwitz used to live with his family was opened for the public as a museum. This house was sold to Counter Extremism Project, a New York-based group, by its last Polish owner. Piotr Cywinski said he wanted to avoid any kind of political controversy in the event and only focused on presenting the Auschwitz survivors and the reminiscences of the Nazi victims. "Memory is not only crying when you look to the past, it is not only empathy when you look to the victims. This is not enough. Memory, I think, is the key for today's time, and the key to finding your position today," he said.
A special responsibility to preserve this memory
The Polish President in a brief interview with the channel, Television Duda said, "We Poles, on whose land, occupied at that time by the Nazi Germans, the Germans built this extermination industry and this concentration camp are today the guardians of this memory. We will always remember and through this memory, the world will never again allow such a dramatic human catastrophe to occur," he said. The US delegation was led by Steve Witkoff, Trump's West Asia envoy who recently brokered a Gaza truce agreement between Israel and Hamas.
Russia, the outcast
The point to note was that, although the Red Army had liberated Auschwitz in 1945, and Russia was a regular visitor to the Auschwitz anniversary events, this year Russia was not invited. The representatives from the Kremlin had been banned from all the anniversary events following Russia's full-scale war on Ukraine that had started in February 2022. The Kremlin had also justified this war making a false pretext that Ukraine whose President happened to be a Jew was being governed by the Nazi administration! Ukrainian President Volodimir Zelensky also attended the commemoration ceremony. Russian President Vladimir Putin had made such a national cult out of Russia's victory over Hitler's Nazi Germany that anyone differing with his or his administration's decision was being labeled as Nazi. But the shameful and equally fearful fact that was kept under cover was that until 1941, when the Nazis were in full swing killing the Auschwitz prisoners in gas chambers, Russia was a good ally to Hitler and his government. In 1939, Stalin and Hitler signed a non - non-non-aggression treaty as the pretext of their joint invasion of Poland in 1939. On the issue of not inviting Russia, the Russian Foreign Ministry Spokesperson, Maria Zakharova sharply rebuked the Polish government saying, "Your lives, jobs, entertainment and the very existence of your people, your children have been paid for with the blood of Soviet soldiers who defeated the Third Reich." On the other hand, the pro - pro-Ukrainians had stated on social media that Ukrainian soldiers, not the Russian soldiers had liberated Auschwitz. The first troop that had reached the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination complex was the 60th army of the First Ukrainian Front, a Soviet troop formed by collating soldiers from all across the Soviet Union. This troop had liberated 7000 prisoners from the main camp of Auschwitz, the nearby Birkenau camp, and the Monowitz Labour Camp.
West Asian political controversy creeps in.
The pro - pro-Palestinians made a demand to the Polish government to arrest the members of the Israel delegation team, led by the Israeli Education Minister, Yoav Kisch, because of the Gaza genocide. The International Criminal Court had already issued an arrest warrant on the Israel President, Benjamin Netanyahu. Although Netanyahu was not supposed to be at the Auschwitz ceremony, the Polish government had promised that none of the members of the Israel delegation would be arrested.
Auschwitz Commandant's House narrates the spine-chilling history.
Grazyna Jurczak had lived in that three-storeyed house in Oswiecim of Southern Poland for 42 years of her life. Situated on the opposite side of a former gas chamber and a gallow, the house was surrounded by a wall, inside which a beautiful garden surrounded the house. Sometimes Grazyna used to wonder, what kind of horrendous things p had happened inside those facilities that stood on the opposite side of her house. And looking at the gas chamber and the gallow, day after day, year after year, what was going on in the mind of the beholder, who was the original inmate of that house, back in those days of the war! Because that inmate was none other than the Auschwitz Commandant, Rudolf Hoss who used to live with his family in that house, which was also his office quarter. But according to Grazyna Jurczak, now aged 62, a widowed mother of two sons, the house was a "great place to raise children." She said that the house, based on which the Oscar-winning film, The Zone of Interest was made, had "safety, silence and a beautiful garden", near which was a river. In Winter, her two boys used to skate in the nearby ice skating rink. After her husband passed away, she became alone in the house and people after watching the movie used to frequent in her garden, give a wick through the window, and tell her about the home's connection with the history. In the Summer of 2024, Grazyna decided to sell the house and finalized the deal with the Counter Extremism Project, a New York-based group that had planned to turn the house into a museum and open it to the public. Grazyna left the house in August 2024 and the project took over the house and its nearby building in October. "I had to get out of the house," said Grazyna sitting at her new apartment, at a distance of 1 km. From the house. Although she had declined to disclose the exact amount at which the house was sold, she gave a slight hint that the figure was a little more than the estimated value of the property, $ 1,20,000. The house was about to be opened to the public on the 80th anniversary of the Red Army's liberation from the Auschwitz Concentration Camp. The Auschwitz - Birkenau State Museum which worked for the remembrance of the Nazi victims had hosted dozens of world leaders for this commemoration ceremony.
At the house, the workers had removed all the new things that were added to the different places of the house and returned it's old look, exactly the way it was when Rudolf Hoss and his family had inhabited the house from 1941 to 1945. The old Nazi-era bathroom door lock was still there, with "Frei / Besetzei” written on it in German which meant, "Free / Occupied.” The Mezuzah, a piece of parchment with biblical inscriptions on it had been fixed on the front door frame to respect the Hebrew tradition. After the war was finished, Commandant Hoss revived his memory about how the successful gassing of the Russian prisoners in 1941 "had set my mind at rest, for the mass extermination of the Jews was to start soon." Rudolf Hoss was hanged in 1947 on the gallow of Auschwitz, situated between the house and the crematory. A table was there at a corner downstairs that Commandant Hoss had used as his office. On that table, many torn Nazi-era newspapers and a few artifacts had been found. Among them, there was a coffee mug with a German SS seal embossed on it and a beer bottle. A stripped pajama was found in the attic where it was used to block a hole. The pajama was worn by a camp prisoner once. The researchers of the project were trying to find out the identity of the prisoner with the help of a prisoner number, found on the pajama. One red triangle, which meant he was a political prisoner, and a yellow star of David indicating his Jewish origin were stitched on the pajama. Mark Wallace, a lawyer and a former US diplomat who also happened to be the Chief Executive of the Counter Extremism Project said, "This house has been closed for 80 years. It was out of reach to the victims and their families. Finally, we can open it to honor survivors and show that this place of incredible evil is now open to all." According to Wallace, the plan was set by the Project to turn the house and its adjacent property into "Auschwitz Research Center on Hate, Extremism and Radicalisation." This center would work to spread the solemn pledge "Never Again ", taken in those historical days, and initiate activities to keep the pledge alive among the people of the present time. Piotr Cywinski the Director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum said his state-run organization believed in the preservation of the remembrance but also saw the benefits of supporting this new project that would focus on the present and future time, keeping the past in mind. “Fighting against today's reality is easier for an NGO than for a state institution." He resented the increasing rise of the neo-nationalism culture all across Europe and condemned it as the "Cancer of democracy." This new center included Rudolf Hoss's entire wartime property along with a garden that was closed for a long time. In this garden, Hoss used to meet Hitler's security chief, Heinrich Himmler, Josef Mengele, the diabolic doctor known as "the Angel of Death" and other high-ranking Nazi dignitaries who were assigned with the task of en masse extermination of the Jews. An American architect, Daniel Libeskind had been given the job to restructure the entire property. He had visualized to design of the interior of Hoss's house according to the theme of "a void, an abyss." The exterior could not be changed according to the UNESCO heritage preservation rule. A partly buried structure with a meeting room, a library, and a data center would be constructed in the garden area. Every year more than two million visitors from all over the world visit Auschwitz and come out "horrified and mesmerized with death" according to Daniel. He also stressed the emergence of making the people "engage with contemporary anti-Semitism and other extremism in our political culture."
Jacek Purski, the Director of the Polish anti-extremism group, was attached to this project. He intended to use the house and the horrors of the Nazi era as the weapon to fight against currently emerging extremist ideals. As he looked at a chimney of the crematory from a second-floor window of Hoss's house, he said, "A house is a house. But it is in uninteresting regular houses like this where extremism is happening today." Grazyna said, she still tried to match the simple happiness and the ordinary memories of her 42 years of family life in that house with its demonic past. While recollecting the happy memories of her family life there, she stopped suddenly and then said, "I worry that I sound like Hoss's wife." Grazyna referred to Hedgwig Hoss whose character in the movie The Zone of Interest was seen speaking about her house as "paradise”. The character was seen wearing a far coat, taken away from a prisoner whom Rudolf Hoss had sentenced to death. After watching the movie, Grazyna thought the commandant's wife, "was perhaps even worse than her husband" in the way she had expressed her indifference to the sufferings of the prisoners. When he was counting his days in a Polish jail, Rudolf Hoss had written his autobiography which the Italian author and Auschwitz survivor Primo Levy said was the writing of a "drab functionary", who "evolved step by step into one of the greatest criminals in history." A Polish army officer, worked at the nearby army camp had originally built the house sometime between the First and Second World War. Immediately after capturing the camp in 1939 following their invasion of Poland, Hitler decided to turn the army camp into a mass killing zone. The SS had decided to turn the house into the Auschwitz Commandant's official quarter. Hoss had also changed the number of the street into 88, a numerical code for the Nazi slogan Heil Hitler. After the war, the house was returned to its original owner and later it was sold to the husband of Grazyna Jurczak. The family had lived there until the last year. Extremism, Cywinski said, "is unfortunately not a mental illness, it is a method." It had risen out of mass frustration. Common people with ordinary ambitions could turn into monsters. He also mentioned, that Hitler "was a wonderful father to his kids and at the same time the main organizer of the brutal killings in the history of the world."
The backdrop for Auschwitz
Hitler himself had fought for Germany in the First World War. After the shameful defeat of Germany in that war followed by the entire nation's humiliation at the Treaty of Versailles, the young Hitler was fuming with rage to take the revenge.
It was a strange irony of history that Adolf Hitler was never a German. He was Austrian. But for some mysterious reasons, he throughout his life had felt oneness with the entire German nation. Consciously or subconsciously he had always thought, he was a German. Had this tendency originated from a racial inferiority complex? Since Germans never looked at Austrians as a nation of their equal stature? So the subconscious psyche of the fearlessly ambitious Hitler had made him deny his Austrian origin and established this belief that he was a German.
During this time, a large part of the German economy was being controlled by the German Jewish community. Hitler and his cronies in those days of terrible inflation in the German economy had come to this inference that Jews and their economic power were the main responsible factors for Germany's downfall and the economic deprivation of the German people. On 15 September 1935, Reichstag Nuremberg law was issued in two categories. In the first one, the decree about the Reich Citizenship Law was issued. And in the second, getting married to or having any kind of relationship with the Jewish community became strictly forbidden. In 1939, after attacking Poland, Hitler ordered the killing of the Polish intellectual class along with the Polish leaders. The surrounding areas of Auschwitz were included within the German territory.
The Katin Massacre
But there was also a flip side. Since the Middle Ages, Russia had a history of unlawful invasions and oppression of its neighbor East European countries. This tradition, established by the almighty Czarist Russia, was being carried out by the modern Russian administration even after being transformed into a socialist welfare state after the Bolshevik Revolution. So the then ruler, Yozef Stalin was no exception. Among the most tortured countries, Poland was always at the forefront. This ancient land of Poles had been the worst hit victim during every political turmoil of East Europe. But the brave Poles never bowed down to any unjust political order. As a result, their land got washed in blood of their own, time and again. Just before Hitler's attack, following resistance from the Polish intellectual class against Russia's unfair political demand, the Russian military under Stalin's order had arrested 25000 Polish academicians and intellectuals and had taken them inside the Katin forest of Poland. There the Russian army had shot them dead and buried them in a mass grave. After they invaded Poland, the German army found that grave dug out the corpses, made the newsreel of the entire massacre, and handed the copies of that reel to several international news agencies. Thus, the entire world came to know about the massacre that had become infamous as the Katin Massacre in history.
How Auschwitz was built
After invading Poland in September of 1939, Adolf Hitler turned the Auschwitz army barrack and its adjacent facilities into a conglomeration of prison camps. From the beginning till 1940, the prisons were reserved for Polish political prisoners. In 1941 a group of German criminals had been brought to the prison camp to run it. Within a short while the prison camps became infamous for their sadistic torture of the prisoners. In August of 1941, Soviet soldiers and Polish prisoners were sent to the gas chamber of block 11 of Auschwitz 1, the main camp. During the end of that year, in collaboration between German soldiers and local associates, 5,00,000 - 8,00,000 Soviet Jews were killed in mass killings. On 20 January 1942, at the conference in Berlin, the high-ranking Nazi officer, Reinhardt Heidrich presented the final outline of the final solution regarding the Jews, in front of the senior Nazi leaders. Within the next few days, the goods carriage trains from all corners of Europe started gathering the entire European Jewish race in those concentration camps. Most of those people were gas-chambered immediately after their arrival.
After they arrive at the camp, the prisoners used to be shaved along with their hairs. Then their prisoner numbers used to be tattooed on their hands and after sanitizing them, they were given striped uniforms that were full sleeve shirts and pajamas. On 3 - 5 September 1941, 600 Soviet war prisoners and 250 sick Polish prisoners were told that they would have to walk naked to a particular room of the Block 11 to collect their new uniform. That the room was a gas chamber was kept hidden from them. After entering that room, the door was locked from the outside, and the ceiling pipeline; poisonous gas was released into that room. That was the first experiment. On 17 and 18 July 1943, when Heinrich Himmler inspected the camps, he saw an exhibition of selected Dutch Jewish prisoners and the mass killing sight at the Bunker 2 gas chamber. This gas chamber was known as the "Little White Room." The inside of the gas chamber was painted in white. And showers were fixed on the ceilings through which the Zyklon - B gas would get released. At a distance, there were rows of dressing rooms. From there the prisoners were taken through a 5-yard-long narrow corridor to a place, in front of which the door of the gas chamber would get opened. Sometimes, the prisoners were told that they were being taken to undergo disinfection. There were four crematoriums fully operational from 1943. Between 1942 and '44, on average, 1000 bodies used to be cremated every day. Although, sometimes to make the process fast, three to five bodies were burnt together. Thus in one day, almost 8000 bodies would get burnt.
The Monowitz Labour Camp - (Auschwitz III)
In 1941, after examining different sites around Auschwitz, the German chemical manufacturer IG - -Farben had chosen a place called, Monowitz, situated at a distance of 7 km from Auschwitz, for the construction of a factory, in order to manufacture a synthetic rubber substance called, Buna - N. The location of the Monowitz chemical factory due to its closeness to the Auschwitz camp benefited from the easy labor supply. Also, the location was beneficial for smooth railway transportation and the smooth supply of raw materials. In 1941, the Nazi Minister of Interior Head, SS, Heinrich Himmler had ordered to expel the Polish Jews of Oswiecim and all the efficient Polish workers, to work for the construction of the factory. He also ordered the Auschwitz prisoners to work at the construction site. On some days, the workers would receive orders to wake up at 3 am and walk a few miles to the factory. They were also ordered to sing and look sharp while walking. Later, the chemical company built a facility near the factory to inhabit the workers there. This facility was named Auschwitz III Sub camp which later, was turned into a concentration camp. This was the only concentration camp that was built with private financing. Within 1943 - 1945, out of the 35000 labourers, who worked in the factory, 23000 had died from malnutrition, diseases, and exhaustion. The prisoners had turned into living skeletons. The prison guards used to intimidate the prisoners by sending them to gas chambers. The smell of thick smoke from the gas chamber chimneys had filled the air all the time. The Allied Forces had bombed the plant several times in 1945. On 19 January of that year, the Nazis decided to close the factory and sent the 9000 workers of the factory to other concentration camps. The 800 sick, hospitalized at the Monowitz hospital were rescued with a few others left behind, by the 1st Ukrainian Front of the Red Army on 27 January 1945.
The other sides
In the Wirtschaftshof Budy camp, the workers were made to make fertilizer by mixing the human ashes from the crematorium with grass, earth, and manure! Overall, the number of prisoners was so high that apart from all the crematoriums, bodies used to be cremated in open-air crematoriums also. In every batch of prisoners, the persons, irrespective of man, woman, or child, who had bandages, wounds, or blisters on their body, would get selected for the gas chamber immediately. Then the physically disabled persons were also the immediate choice. The guards and some middle-ranking Nazi soldiers and officers had become wealthy in those days by confiscating or stealing the valuable belongings of the prisoners.
The horrors of Auschwitz
A day used to start at 4:30 in the morning for males. For females, it was a little early. The supervisor used to ring the bell and beat the prisoners for completing their nature calls quickly. The toilets and the water were unhygienic. After that, the prisoners used to wait in the open compound for roll calls. Be it harsh Winter or torrential rain, they had to wait in that open compound. They used to be punished for serious offenses like escape attempts and trifle ones, like the absence of buttons on shirts or not properly cleaning the bowl. The prisoners had to take an hour's walk to their place of work and would work an 11-hour shift. The second roll call used to take place in the evening when some of them used to get hanged or receive a beating. If one of them would get missing, the rest would have to wait till that person was found. On 6 July 1940, the prisoners had to stand for 19 hours at a stretch for this reason. In a bogie, 800 - 1000 people were made to sleep. Like animals, these people would push, bite, and scratch one another to make a little more space so that they could rest. They never had much time to rest.
The condition of female prison cells was much worse. Giselle Parl, the Romanian Jewish gynecologist and a concentration camp survivor wrote her experience, " For 30000 to 32000 women there was one toilet and we would be allowed to use that toilet at one particular time of the day. We used to wait in line in knee-deep human excrement, to go to the toilet. Almost all of us were suffering from dysentery. That's why while standing for so long, we couldn't control ourselves and would make our clothes dirty. Besides, that terrible smell of excrement around us would make us dirtier. In the toilet, there was a deep ridge upon which occasionally the guards used to throw a narrow wooden platform and we used to sit on that just like a line of birds sit on a wire."
The deadly medical experiments on the female prisoners
The Nazi doctors had run different sadistic medical experiments on the Auschwitz female prisoners. Some doctors had experimented with the deadly X-ray on them. The doctor, Karl Clauberg had injected dangerous chemicals inside the uterus of some lady prisoners. A group of 150 female prisoners had died in an experiment on anesthesia. Sometimes some prisoners were made to stay in rooms, so rancid that even animals wouldn't like to stay there.
The brutality with the child prisoners
The most notorious among the Nazi doctors, Joseph Mengele used to kill identical twin children and run autopsies on their dead bodies. Another doctor, Kart Heismeier had taken away 20 Polish Jew children from Auschwitz to run an experiment on tuberculosis on them. He administered tuberculosisBasilie injections into those children's bodies. To hide that experiment, in April of 1945, those 20 children were murdered by hanging.
The Gas Chamber Diary
At the time of entering the gas chambers, the unwilling prisoners would get shot or thrown into the mouth of the wild Alsatians and those beasts used to tear them into pieces. The Sonderkommando member, Leib Langfuss had buried his diary, which he had written in Yiddish language, near the crematorium III of Auschwitz II. The discovery of that diary in 1952 had brought in front of the world, a nightmarish account of the inside scenario of the gas chambers, "It was hard to imagine that so many people could be accommodated within such a small place. The hours-long wait that followed had asphyxiated them in the absence of sufficient oxygen. Then all the doors would be closed and the poisonous gas would start coming in through the shower-like systems at the roof. The people standing in a jam-packed situation like a herd of animals, couldn't do anything. So they used to shout in bitter, hopeless voices. Some would complain about the ambiance in a depressing tone. Others would start crying in heart-wrenching voices. Gradually their voices would become weak. People would start dying and falling on one another. This used to go on until the entire group of people would become a one-meter-high mound of five to six layers of dead bodies. Mothers used to hold their babies tight to their chests and slowly fall to the ground. Husbands and wives would slowly freeze to death holding each other. Some of the people would make up a formless mass. Others stood in a leaning position, while the upper parts from the stomach up, were in a lying position. Some of the people had turned completely blue under the influence of the gas, while others looked entirely fresh as if they were asleep."
In other concentration camps, women's hair used to be shaved before throwing them inside the gas chambers. But in Auschwitz women's hairs were taken only after their death. Afterward, those hairs used to be chemically processed, packed, and sent. By 6 February 1943, the Reich Finance Ministry had received 3000 kg of women's hairs from Auschwitz and Mazdanek camps. In 1945, at the time of liberating Auschwitz, the Red Army had found 7000 kg of women's hair.
As per the order of Heinrich Himmler, since 23 September 1940, the Sonderkommandos started picking up gold from the teeth of dead bodies in the camps. The accumulated gold used to be sent to the nearby offices. In the beginning of 1944, 10-12 kg of gold used to be collected from the dead prisoners' teeth, every month. On 30th October 1944, for the last time, the prisoners were selected for the gas chamber. On the next 1st or 2nd November, Himmler had ordered the SS to stop the killing and on 25 November he had ordered to close Auschwitz Concentration Camp.
How the world came to know about Auschwitz
The Polish Home Army Captain, Witold Pilecki had supplied the inside information of Auschwitz to the Allied Force. The Captain under the sobriquet of Tomasz Serafinski with prisoner number: 4859 had willfully surrendered to the Nazis and was sent to Auschwitz. There he stayed from 22 September 1940 to 27 April 1943, when he had successfully escaped from the camp. Captain Pilecki's objective was to hold the morale of the inmates, arrange food and clothing for them, supply information to the Polish army, and finally create a mass resistance movement which he had named, the Union of Military Organization. He had prepared two reports about his experience at Auschwitz. In the second report named, "Report W, Auschwitz I" he furnished details about his life in the camp. In October 1940, a Polish engineer, Alexander Wilkopolowski was released. He had disclosed the entire details about the hell that Auschwitz was to the Polish army. In November, the Polish Underground prepared a report titled, “The Camp Auschwitz", based on which a booklet was published by the Polish Foreign Ministry from London with the title, "The German Occupation of Poland." On 1st July 1942, in the Polish Fortnightly Review - Birkenau, the news of the torture of Russian war prisoners and Polish prisoners was published. In London, on 21 July 1942, the banished Polish government first flashed the news of the prisoners dying in gas chambers at Auschwitz. The "Combat Group of Auschwitz" with the assistance of the Sonderkommando notes, had buried in the ground and had smuggled the information to the outside world. The group had also sent the photographs, taken by Sonderkommando, of the surroundings of Auschwitz II gas chambers, inside a toothpaste packet, to the outside world. Sadly enough, during the beginning of 1943 and 1944, the British and American governments had suppressed the grotesque details of the tortures and mass extermination in the fear of a backlash of the British people on the government to take necessary actions on behalf of the Jewish prisoners. And this could have affected the British political relationship with the Middle East Muslim administration. Even the banished Polish government in London had also followed the same policy. But going against all these bureaucracies, the Polish Resistance Group released all the horrible incidents of Auschwitz and Birkenau in detail in front of the world.
Escape from Auschwitz
As per the official record, 802 people had tried to escape from Auschwitz. Among them, 144 had made it successfully, and 327 were arrested and punished. But what had happened to the rest of the 331 prisoners couldn't be found out. On 20 June 1942, four prisoners named Eugeniusz Bendera, Kazimierz Piechowski, Stanislaw Gustaw Jaster, and Jozef Lempart entered a warehouse. There, three of them had worn the SS officer's uniforms and taken the fourth person as their prisoner. Then after managing an SS staff car, they drove out of the camp. On 21 July 1944, the Polish prisoner, Jerzy Bielecki in an SS uniform and holding a pass had taken a Jewish prisoner woman, Cyla Cybulska, actually his girlfriend, and just walked out of the camp. All along, he had pretended that the woman was being taken for interrogation. They had survived the war. Afterward, for saving the life of that Jewish woman, Israel's Yaad Vashem decorated Jerzy Bielecki with the honorary title, "Righteous Among The Nations." On April 27, 1944, Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler fled the concentration camp and entered Slovakia where they had divulged the details about the gas chambers to the Slovakian Jewish Council. Because of this Vrba-Wetzler report, the deportation of the Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz was stopped and many Jewish lives were saved.
Bombing the Auschwitz
In 1941's January, the Commander Chief of the Polish army, who was also the banished Polish Prime Minister, Wladyslaw Sikorski, had sent a report, written by the Auschwitz prisoners, to the Royal Air Force Bomber Command, Richard Pierse. In the report, the prisoners had described the brutality of the camp life and the horrors of those gas chambers. At the end of the report, the prisoners requested the RAF to destroy Auschwitz by bombing, "The prisoners implore the Polish government to have the camp bombed. With the destruction of the electrified barbed wire, the ensuing panic, and darkness prevailing, the chances of escape would be great. The local population will hide them, and help them to leave the neighborhood. The prisoners are confidently awaiting the day when Polish planes from Great Britain will enable their escape. This is the prisoners' unanimous demand to the Polish government in London." But strangely enough, the Allied Forces had never bombed Auschwitz. Even the IG -Farben factory was bombed within the Auschwitz compound. Then why the concentration camp was left? The bombing could have saved many lives. That remains a big question still today.
The evacuation of Auschwitz
This was another pathetic chapter. Heinrich Himmler had ordered the total evacuation of all the camps in January of 1945. He had given strict orders to the commanders, "The Fuhrer holds you personally responsible for making sure that not a single prisoner from the concentration camps falls alive into the hands of the enemy." A little less than 9000 prisoners, who were extremely sick to move, were left behind. At the first stage of the evacuation, the prisoners were ordered to march. During that march, anyone who was not being able to continue marching was shot. Thus a quarter of the evacuated prisoners were killed. In December of 1944, some 15000 prisoners could make it to their destination, the Bergen-Belsen concentration camps in Germany. On 15 April 1945, the British army had liberated them.
The Liberation
On 27 January 1945, around 9 in the morning, a soldier from the 100th division of the Red Army entered Auschwitz III. That had become the first liberated camp. The noted Italian author and Auschwitz survivor Primo Levy had written his experience of watching the four soldiers coming towards the camp on horseback on that day. The soldiers threw "strangely embarrassed glances at the sprawling bodies, at the battered huts and at us few still alive... They did not greet us, nor did they smile; they seemed oppressed not only by compassion but by a confused restraint, which sealed their lips and bound their eyes to the funeral scene. It was that shame we knew so well, the shame that drowned us after the selections, and every time we had to watch or submit to, some outrage: the shame the Germans did not know, that the just man experiences at another man's crime; the feeling of guilt that such a crime should exist, that it should have been introduced irrevocably into the world of things that exist, and that his will for good should have proved too weak or null, and should not have availed in defense."
In 1980, the Soviet soldier Georgii Elisavetskii had recalled, that he had heard other soldiers telling the prisoners, "You are free, comrade's." The prisoners didn't respond to that. So Georgii had said it in Russian, Polish, German, and Ukrainian. Then Georgii had spoken in Yiddish, and the prisoners, "They think that I am provoking them. They begin to hide. And only when I said to them: 'Do not be afraid, I am a colonel of the Soviet army and a Jew. We have come to liberate you...... Finally, as if the barrier collapsed..... They rushed towards us shouting, fell on their knees, kissed the flaps of our overcoats, and threw their arms around our legs."
The Soviet Army hospital, the Polish Red Cross hospitals, and the Red Cross treated the sick survivors suffering from starvation and tuberculosis. The Soviet Army, too busy advancing towards Berlin, Germany didn't pay much attention to the Holocaust survivors. But when the Western allies arrived at the camps, they were so moved by the spectacles that they began the international coverage of Auschwitz, Birkenau, and other East European camps. Many blocks of Auschwitz had been turned into hospitals where the healthcare personnel used to work 18-hour shifts.
Life after the war
Only 15% of Auschwitz's total manpower which constituted 789 personnel was tried. The trial proceedings took place in the Federal Republic of Germany and Poland. When the camp Commandant, Rudolf Hoss was arrested by the British on 11 March 1946, he was working as a farmer somewhere in northern Germany under the name of Franz Lang. Hoss was tried at Nuremberg in the historic Nuremberg Trial. Hoss had directly admitted all his wrongdoings and also said, that he had executed all the orders, that came from Heinrich Himmler. The trial of the Auschwitz staff began in Poland on 25 November 1947 and ended on 22nd December of that year. 23 camp staff were sentenced to death, 7 were sentenced to life and others were sentenced to different jail terms. The owner and the chief executive officer of the chemical farm that had supplied Zyklon B were arrested and executed.
The most notable trial was that of Horst Fischer, one of the highest-ranking SS doctors of Auschwitz. Fischer had personally sentenced 75000 men, women, and child prisoners to the gas chambers of Auschwitz! He was apprehended in 1965 and was tried in East Germany. His verdict was death by guillotine. And following the perfect justice, Horst Fischer was guillotined.
The former Chancellor of West Germany during the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the '90s, Helmut Kohl had said on the 50th anniversary of the liberation, "The darkest and most awful chapter of German history was written at Auschwitz." A priest, Maximilian Kolbe had voluntarily died by starvation while saving the life of an unknown person in the camp. He was canonized to sainthood by the Catholic Church later.
The story of a survivor!
Pregnant for eight months, Rose Girone, the resident of Breslau, Germany had seen her husband, taken away to the Buchenwald concentration camp in 1938. She somehow had managed to escape to Shanghai where she was made to live in a bathroom for the next seven years in a Jewish ghetto. After settling down in the USA, she had rented almost everything that she could manage, to raise her daughter while simultaneously continuing knitting work. Overcoming all hardships and confronting two major epidemics, Rose embraced life with all her positive energy. She would often say, "Aren't we lucky?" Believed to be the oldest Holocaust survivor, Rose Girone passed away on 24 February this year at a Long Island hospital. Her daughter and a fellow camp survivor, Reha Bennicasa had informed about her demise. Rose was 113 years old.
The Amsterdam Mayor apologizes for the Holocaust.
After 80 years, the Mayor of Amsterdam, Femke Halsema apologized for the Holocaust of the city's Jewish community back in the days of the Second World War and reiterated that apology for the city's failure to protect its Jewish citizens. The Mayor's apology stood as the official acknowledgment of the then city leaders' collective moral failure, "Amsterdam government was, when it mattered, not heroic, not determined, not merciful. And it horridly abandoned its Jewish residents." At a Holocaust commemoration ceremony at the theatre Hollandsche Shouwburg, Femke apologized in her speech. This theatre was turned into a deportation center by Hitler from where so many Dutch Jews had been deported to several concentration camps in the Netherlands and other corners of Europe. At the beginning of the war, 80,000 Jews used to live in the Netherlands. The Nazis in collaboration with the then Dutch officials had wiped out almost 60,000 of them. Femke said, "Administrators and officials were not only cold and formalistic but even willing to cooperate with the occupier. That was an indispensable step in the isolation, humiliation, deportation, dehumanization, and murdering of 60,000 Amsterdam Jews." The Amsterdam government had provided all the official assistance to the Nazis. The city's municipal officials had made a detailed map of the city's Jewish settlement and the city police had helped in the deportation of the Jewish prisoners. "Anti-Semitism was brought to the Netherlands by the German occupier and it didn't disappear after the liberation. There had always been hatred against Jews - also in this town ....," said Femke. The Mayor had announced that the Amsterdam government would grant a fund worth $ 28.5 million for officially promoting the Jewish culture and Judaism. A six-member committee had also been set up for the planning and execution of that project. Karen Hirsch, an Amsterdam councilwoman of Jewish descendant said, "I hadn't expected that. A lot is unknown about Judaism and Amsterdam's history." All through the Netherlands, the Nazis had sent 75% of the country's Jewish population to several concentration camps. That was the highest percentage in all of Western Europe. Most of these Jews happened to be the citizens of Amsterdam. The transit authority of Amsterdam and other government agencies were instrumental in the deportation of the captive Jews and Romani communities, also known as the Roma and Sinti communities. Reflecting on the city agencies' shameful roles, Femke continued in her apology, "You can't turn back time; you can't undo what the municipality did. Getting an apology is important to me. In that sense, words do matter to me." Five years ago, the Dutch Prime Minister, Mark Rutte apologized on behalf of the entire nation for failing shamelessly to save its Jewish citizens during World War II, "With the last remaining survivors among us, I apologize on behalf of the government, for the actions of the government at the time," said Rutte at a memorial ceremony in 2020. The country on a collective level had come to terms with its dark chapters for the last five years.
The lessons Auschwitz had taught us
The date 27 January would appear every year and silently passed without telling us, the people of the Asian continent, anything special. Along with Europe, Asia had also paid its price in the Second World War. The extent that which particular sections of European society had to persevere was death camps or concentration camps, holocaust and people died like flies. Addressing those victims as humans was wrong. Because they were not considered "humans" at all. The general proclamation was made - if you happen to be a Jew of Russian, Polish, German, Italian, or any other origin; or if you happened to be from the community like homosexual, Roma Gypsy, communist, or physically and mentally retarded, your address would be the death camps. Besides, the people of Germany's enemy countries and the prisoners of war were also regular inmates of the concentration camps.
One by one, many camps were established - Ravensbruck, Bergen-Belsen, Riga, Sobibor, and Poland's Auschwitz-Birkenau, the most infamous among all. According to the government record, only in Auschwitz 11 lakh people had perished. The world has seen much genocide since the invasion of Genghis Khan. But within a limited territory, the en masse extermination of that kind of a mammoth proportion of humans was unseen before in the history of civilization. The liberation day of the world's largest genocide center had passed on 27 January, this year. Auschwitz now had become a memorial museum and archive that people from all across the globe came to see.
The lie, fed to the people from the beginning.
At the entrance gate of the camp, it was written in carved iron, "Arbeit Macht Frei" which meant "Your Liberation Lies In Your Deeds." That was an absolute lie. Since you were a prisoner, you put in your hard labor, and one day you would be surely freed. On the other hand, the guards of Auschwitz had shown the prisoners the gas-vomiting chimneys and made cruel jokes that insinuated one thing - your freedom was there, die there, and only then you would be freed. During the Second World War, countless people had entered through the iron gate of Auschwitz and only a few could come out, alive.
The greatest lesson is to stay alive.
The kings and queens of England, France, Denmark, Spain, and the Netherlands had come to attend the 80th commemoration. In the beginning, the Auschwitz Memorial had announced that all the guests were welcome to attend the ceremony but they would have to maintain silence. Because the day, 27 January, was not the day for anyone to speak, but rather the day for everyone to listen. Then who would speak? Those who had crossed that valley of death called Auschwitz, the survivors. They had survived by the dint of their spirit of survival and they had taught the world with their lives that the greatest thing to do in this world was, to survive - to remain alive. Toda Friedman, now 86 years old, one of the youngest survivors of Auschwitz said, in front of me, beside me, and behind me, the shadow of death loomed large all the time. Can you imagine? In the extreme Winter, little girls aged 5, 8, 10, and 12 years, were made to walk on ice in bare feet towards the gas chambers in a tossing motion. At the end of each day, Toda used to think, she was the only Jewish girl in the world who was still alive. Besides, survivors like Marianne Tarsky, Yeaning Yeonska, and Leon Yeontraubar had spoken on that day. And the whole world had listened to them. These survivors were 86, 94, 98, and 100 years old. In 2015 more than 120 Auschwitz survivors were alive. Lily Ebert, the centenarian passed away on the 9 October 2024. She was the author of the great memoir, Lily's Promise.
They are departing us one by one. But many of them have written their memories of Auschwitz and their philosophy of staying alive. Besides, Anne Frank's Diary, Victor Frankley's Man's Search For Meaning, Primo Levy's If This Is A Man and The Periodic Table are the books, that today's world should go back to, again and again. The greatest thing about a book is that it never lets you forget. The biggest disease of today's civilization is, to forget, remain forgetful or make one forget.
Those Auschwitz survivors had told us only one thing repeatedly, we should never forget, what happened with ordinary human beings, how many ways people could hate other people, and how many systems, techniques, and tricks to kill people!
Another reason to remember Auschwitz was that, a great number of people had supported that killing - they had shouted, sometimes in silence, sometimes aloud - yes, kill, kill them all. A huge number of people wanted the total annihilation of the prisoners, specifically the Jewish community. Another large section might have not supported this extermination, but at the same time, they didn't protest, they remained silent.
Have we learned anything from Auschwitz?
At the beginning of the 1930s, Europe didn't pay much attention to Hitler's Nationalism and its related Nazi culture. European people had thought that was only political weaponry. But what happened later, the world remained witness to that. In today's Europe, the Neo-Nazi culture is raising its head and shouting aloud. We haven't learned anything from Auschwitz, then?
The memories of Auschwitz are painful. Sometimes they seem intolerable. But we will have to remember them and carry them inside us. Because those agonies and pains will show us the right way to live life.