The Hindu : International : A warning from history

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Jan 28, 2005

International

International

A warning from history

By P. Subramanyam

LONDON, JAN. 27. On this day 60 years ago, the Soviet Army liberated the death camp factory called Auschwitz-Birkenau in southern Poland. Auschwitz has since become a symbol of the evil that men are capable of, and a warning from history. At the gates of the Bergen-Belson camp in Germany is the inscription: "Never Again.'' An estimated 1.5 million people, the vast majority of them Jews, were systematically murdered in Auschwitz.

Emaciated prisoners

The members of the Soviet 322nd Infantry Division had first thought it was just another prisoner-of-war camp, but as they moved in, they noticed thousands of emaciated prisoners weakly waving a red rag in welcome. Some cried, some laughed. They spoke different languages but it spelt Thank You, said Genry Koptev, now 78, a surviving soldier of the former Soviet Army, who was the first to enter. When Mr. Koptev, then 18, reached the electric fence and the archway on which was inscribed in German, "Work Makes You Free," he and five other fellow-soldiers felt there was something hideously wrong and macabre there. They cut through the barbed wire and entered the camp.

The smell of death, piles of partially burnt bodies, stench, smoke from the gas chambers and hideous torture instruments littered the place. There were countless unlit layers of logs and corpses.

His account: "Their skin was so thin, you could see their veins through it... When they stretched out their hands in desperate plea for help, you could see every bone, joint and sinew.''

Another soldier who was there, Yakov Vinnichenko, asked: "How could people be tortured to make them so frail, skin and bones, that they could hardly stand on their feet?''

Anatoly Shapiro, then an officer, recalled the horror the camp inspired in his men before they set about washing and feeding the survivors: "We saw everything. The chambers used to gas the prisoners, ovens where the bodies were burned. We saw the pile of ash... piles of spectacles, shoes and suitcases... mountains of artificial teeth and human hair."

There was a heap of empty cans of Zyklon-B used in the gas chambers. This was a commercial form of hydrocyanic acid, which becomes active on contact with air. This was used to gas the Jews in specially constructed chambers with showers.

Final solution

Auschwitz saw the largest mass murder ever recorded. Initially it was a place to hold Polish political prisoners. For the Nazi solution for what they called "the Jewish problem," it was developed as a mechanised factory for murder. The Final Solution, as it was called, offers a unique perspective on the camp in which more than one million people were ruthlessly murdered.

The Nazis, obsessed with the notion of creating a "biologically pure" Aryan society, deliberately targeted Jewish children for destruction, in order to prevent the growth of a new generation of Jews in Europe. The children were defined by the Nazis as a "threat" to German society. Only an estimated 11 per cent of Jewish children who were alive in 1933 survived until 1945.

Asked why innocent young children were being executed mercilessly, a German SS guard in a concentration camp said without any remorse: "We are not after children but we are after Jewish blood they carry in them, which should be destroyed." Such was the hatred of Jews, a deadly result of the Nazi brainwashing programmes.

Hitler and his henchmen, namely, the head of SS, Heinrich Himmler, the butcher of Prague, Reinhard Heydrich, and Adolf Eichmann, an SS officer who was the head of the Department for Jewish Affairs in the Gestapo from 1941 to 1945 and was the chief of operations in the deportation of three million Jews to various extermination camps, mostly in Poland, were bent on liquidating the European Jewry. Thus sprang up concentration camps in various parts of Europe.

This writer has visited these places in the past few years, including the Warsaw Ghetto, Crackow, Lublin and the Jewish Ghetto in Prague and the Dachau, near Frankfurt, and Belson in Germany, which was liberated by the British.

But, only one, Auschwitz, has remained intact as a testimony to the chilling events of the past that will go down in history.

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