Local Opinion: A visit to Auschwitz raises troubling questions

Three weeks ago, visiting Krakow, Poland, I summoned the courage to make the trip to nearby Auschwitz.

It was uncommonly hot, even for summer, worse than Arizona in June, and humid. It was hard not to think about the heat but no one complained. Imagine complaining having just learned that an inmate’s rations were a few ounces of bread and one cup of swill before working 12 hours in heat like this, or worse, frigid cold.

We hear of many Holocaust survivors living long lives after their liberation and wonder if they were somehow made stronger by the experience. But I doubt that’s it. Rather, they were exceptionally hardy to begin with. My doctor, the son of Auschwitz survivors, attributes his parents’ survival to the fact that they were made to walk to Auschwitz from their home 25 miles away, rather than stuffed in cattle cars and weakened after days without food and water.

When the trains came in, Nazi doctors made split second decisions whether someone was fit to work, and those few were spared. The rest were sent immediately to the gas chambers, more than 1,000 at a time, as Nazi doctors measured the precise dose of Zyklon B to suffocate them in 30 minutes, but not longer.

As incomprehensible as the numbers killed, up to 10,000 a day, so too is the fact that an immense array of doctors, guards, soldiers and administrators — an army of staff —carried out these acts so compliantly.

There are corroborated accounts, however, that the crematorium was an innovation urged upon Hitler by SS chief Himmler after receiving complaints by soldiers that they were bothered having to shoot thousands of Jews a day in cold blood.

You struggle to not let the staggering numbers numb your mind as mere statistic, clinging to accessible representations of the horror: three people sleeping head to toe in narrow bunks piled on top of each other, trying to survive the night with one bucket of coal for an entire barracks in freezing temperatures; or hundreds using one bathroom, most of them failing to relieve themselves before the morning roll call, then standing often for hours in bitter cold.

The commandant’s wife wrote that her years at Auschwitz were the best of her life. She lived in a mansion with servants, overlooking the chimney puffing out the remains of human corpses. After the war, the commandant was tried and hung in the courtyard where his henchmen shot political prisoners.

The absurdities go on and no one can understand how it could have happened despite brilliant analyses on the subject. But the theories never add up. So the question endures: what is it that allows, or compels, people to commit unimaginable horrors, willingly and without remorse?

What makes one person report a Jewish family, inhabit their house and refuse to return it when the owner, having survived the war comes to reclaim it. Yet another person hides a Jewish family, risking, and often losing, his life for doing so.

I think about our country’s corrosive divisions and the “manipulation of fervor,” by elected leaders that writer Milovan Djilas termed the “germ of bondage.” How strong are we to resist demagogues who summon seditious impulses from their countrymen to sabotage our institutions?

Could a holocaust happen in America? I have no answer, only a question: What in world history, and recent American experience, provides the confidence that it couldn’t?

The final stop on the tour was the death barracks No. 25 at Birkenau where women too weak to work were warehoused without food for days until they could be exterminated. As the tour filtered out, I stayed behind. In those few precious moments alone, I stood by the bunks, said Kaddish, the traditional Jewish prayer for the dead, and walked numbly back to the bus.