Today is the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau. A few months ago I took the trip to the grounds of the former concentration and extermination camp. I found there the ruins of something far more menacing than I could have ever imagined. Beyond the atrocities of ISIS, beyond the barbaric murdering by Boko Haram, this was something inconceivable to anybody with a conscience and a desire to see humans of all cultural, religious, and ethnic backgrounds work together. It was a precisely planned mass extermination. Witnessing the machination of murder is truly the most harrowing thing I have ever experienced.
To put it plainly Birkenau (Auschwitz II) was designated as an extermination camp in 1942. There was a period of 2 months in 1944 where the gas chambers were used to kill 440,000 Hungarian Jews. They were ushered into the underground “showers” by classical music, told to undress, and then killed by the “showers” they were taking. This wasn’t limited to the Jews, as Hitler’s ideology was planned and extended to the Romanies and the Slavic races. At the end of it all at least 1.1 million people died at this complex of camps.
When the Red Army arrived on this day in 1945 they found emaciated survivors with terror in their eyes. Things would never be the same; no flower would ever smell as sweet. At the bottom there is a link to portraits of some of the miraculous survivors of Auschwitz-Birkenau, and it’s a good idea to take a moment, step back, and reflect on how such an ideology can manifest itself in the fabric of our lives. How can we as a species arrive to this barbaric moment? What questions do we need to ask in order to ensure that something like this will never happen again? RIP to all the victims of systemized mass murder all over the world.
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