Holocaust Memorial Day: Reflections on the liberation of Auschwitz
On the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, Professor David Cesarani, Department of History|, reflects on the importance of remembering all victims of the Holocaust.
(Media-Newswire.com) - On the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, Professor David Cesarani, Department of History|, reflects on the importance of remembering all victims of the Holocaust.
It is paradoxical that the focus for remembering the fate of Jews under the Nazis and the persecution of other groups should be the gigantic concentration camp known as Auschwitz. When troops of the Red Army reached the sprawling complex of barracks and barbed wire enclosures the site was virtually empty. They found only 6-7,000 inmates who had been left in the camp infirmaries because they were too enfeebled to join the evacuation that commenced on 17 January. Of the 70,000 prisoners who were marched out of the camp over the following days, barely more than half survived. They were dumped in overcrowded, undersupplied camps in Germany, such as Gross Rosen, Buchenwald, and Belsen that were becoming infernos of disease and starvation. The killing and the dying went on for months after the liberation of the Auschwitz camps.
The images of Auschwitz helped to imprint it into the collective memory of post-war Europe, yet they too are something of a paradox. When the first Soviet cameramen arrived they lacked the equipment to film properly. So the liberation was restaged, with Polish villagers from the neighbourhood used as extras. In reality the iconic representations of Auschwitz did not capture the moment liberation; it remains elusive. So why does the 27th January resonate in history, memory and culture?
For many years it did not. In Western Europe, Dachau and Belsen were more familiar indices of Nazi barbarity. For East Germans, Buchenwald became the site of memory - a shrine to anti-fascism. Auschwitz was preserved by the Poles for whom the original camp, Auschwitz I, was a site of martyrdom and resistance. But Auschwitz-II, Birkenau, where a million Jews had been murdered was largely dismantled. Locals used the wood from the barracks where Jews had once been confined to rebuild their homes. Over the years, Auschwitz became the stage for a communist morality play in which the mass murder of the Jews was relegated to the margins. Only the international committee of survivors paid attention to the ruins of the gas chambers and crematoria, campaigning for the establishment of an appropriate memorial in the vicinity.
The international dimensions of Auschwitz help to explain why it emerged from obscurity and assumed such a dominant place in memory of the Nazi era. Jews and resistance fighters were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau from all over Europe. The pitifully small number of survivors who returned to their homes seeded knowledge of the camp in the societies where they rebuilt their lives. In Germany, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, Italy, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Greece and other countries committees emerged to keep the memory alive. These survivor communities contributed to the establishment of national pavilions in the main camp and drove the annual memorial gathering.
Auschwitz came to embody the genocide against Europe’s Jews, but it also came to exemplify what was believed at different times and in various places to be the essence of National Socialism. To communist ideologues, the fact that German corporations such as I G Farben had located to Auschwitz in order to exploit slave labour proved the nexus between fascism and capitalism. In Western Europe, from the 1960s onwards, the ‘death factory’ seemed to underpin the relationship of modernity to mass murder. Bureaucracy, perverted science, the division of labour all contributed to the destruction process. Hence, it was widely asserted, Auschwitz was a harbinger of the nuclear age.
Finally, in the 1990s the place became accessible in way that was not the case for equally lethal death camps such as Treblinka and Belzec. These camps, which bruited a vast toll of death over a much shorter period, were erased before the war ended and were tucked away in remote locations. There was not much to see even if you could get to the sites. By contrast, Auschwitz was located near an attractive city, Krakow, with full tourist amenities and an airport serviced by low-cost carriers. It is no accident that Auschwitz reached its apogee in the era of cheap mass transport. But here we arrive at another paradox.
Historical research on the annihilation of Europe’s Jewish population is now highlighting the slaughter of 1.5-2 million Jews on the territory of the USSR in 1941-42. Historians are looking more closely at the huge ghettos such as Lodz, Lwow, Lublin and of course Warsaw. More Jews lived in Warsaw than the combined Jewish populations of France, Belgium and the Netherlands. Some 300,000 were murdered in Treblinka between July and September 1942. The new Museum of Polish Jewry, built on the ruins of the ghetto, is now drawing visitors to this place of Jewish life, creativity and extinction. Will it come to rival Auschwitz as a place of memory?
Auschwitz has become emblematic of Nazi racial-biological policies, the ghastly eugenics workshop where those deemed unworthy of life were murdered and doctors inspired by race science tried to unlock the secrets of inherited characteristics by experimenting on human guinea pigs. It represents the apex of murderous hatred, the end of a road paved by prejudice, discrimination and exclusion. But where did the road begin? Auschwitz tells us little about the religious antipathies that were the matrix for all that followed. Before they inaugurated Auschwitz, Germans had torched synagogues, desecrated torah scrolls, and humiliated rabbis. Lutheran theologians in Germany had purged the New Testament of Jewish references and purified the liturgy to remove any reference to Jews. They had turned Jesus into an Aryan.
On the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz we must remember the million innocents who suffered and died in the network of camps. The Nazis wanted to obliterate all trace of their memory while the survivors clung to life in order to bear witness to this greatest of all atrocities. We owe it to them to keep the memory alive. And part of that task is preventing Auschwitz from ossifying into a symbol and becoming an obstacle to critical thinking.
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