“I did not ask the big questions for fear that the answers would be too little” - Raul Hilberg, Holocaust scholar interviewed by Claude Lanzmann in his film, Shoah.
In a recent email exchange with a friend whose grandfather was in the SS, I suggested that we visit a Holocaust site, unknown to either of us. For me, it’s a mechanism for communing with familiar ghosts, safely. Some courageous few, children and grandchildren of Nazis, face their own traumatic legacy by performing acts of redemption by proxy and replenishing lost love through their own search for serenity.
My friend said she’d find somewhere, but “not A…….z.” I’m not sure why she wrote it in that format, as if writing the whole word was to blaspheme. One single word – Auschwitz – has now come to mean the Holocaust, in its totality, A to Z.
I was always struck by the onomatopoeia. Au, like the sound we make instinctively when we’re physically cut or burnt. Schwitzen, German for sweat, invokes the harshest conditions in the crematoria and slave labour camps sprawled over 16 square miles of this infamous “zone of interest”. But in Yiddish, Schwitzen also means to boast. I hear the gleeful arrogance of a regime murdering and enslaving its enemies at will. Auschwitz, the Germanised word for Oswiecim, the small neighbouring town, is known now for nothing else.
Marty Morrissey gets an A+ in new football rules, even if some pundits aren’t yet sold
Breda O’Brien: Nicole Kidman’s Babygirl isn’t the ‘hottest film this year’. It might be among the most depressing
High noon for developer Paddy Kelly, who faces run-in with the sheriff over unpaid rent arrears
Pat Leahy: Angry Dáil scenes were partly the result of Sinn Féin’s determination to be a more aggressive Opposition
Eighty years ago on January 27th, Soviet soldiers liberated Auschwitz. That day, chosen as International Holocaust Memorial Day by the UN in 2005, is commemorated by many countries including Ireland. Visited by 40 million people since 1993, Auschwitz is now a Unesco Heritage site, a name synonymous with the Holocaust. As the last survivors leave us, why should we continue to study the Holocaust?
Over the last dozen years, I have immersed myself in the history of the Holocaust. My advocacy has demanded much more knowledge than the scant education I received at school and the fragmented family story I inherited. While the personal connection adds to the intensity of my research, the uniqueness of the Holocaust should not be confused with any perceived cry for Jewish exceptionalism. Special treatment for Jews? I know what that looks like; it ends at a railway terminus. No, counterintuitively, the Holocaust spelled exceptionalism for the individual, all of us: victim, bystander and perpetrator, each of us linked to and implicated by separate and interconnected societies that permitted it to happen: thousands upon thousands of decisions taken, electorally, economically, reflexively, individually.
One in six of the Jews murdered in the Holocaust was killed at Auschwitz, including my paternal grandfather’s parents and his brother. The ashes of more relatives are scattered there, but they remain nameless, the very erasure of the Nazis’ objective. To honour the victims, we should consider the injustice of a single death, an individual life expunged, and multiply that thought by millions; the inverse to Stalin’s chilling maxim distinguishing tragedy from statistic.
Auschwitz was a unique site in the concentration camp (KL) system administered by the SS, where prisoners were placed outside all legal protection. Unique in scale as a combined slave labour and death camp, more than 1 million people were murdered there, including 200,000 children, mostly by Zyklon B gas. Horrific medical experiments, torture, starvation, sexual abuse were routine; all morality was suspended.
The cousin of an old friend who survived Auschwitz died in 2022, in Paris. His ashes were scattered on the camp grounds as he wished to be reunited with his family, all of whom had been gassed on arrival. Auschwitz, capital crime scene and graveyard.
To interrogate the Holocaust is to understand that this history cannot be viewed as a single event. It lies, not in state, but as the rotting corpse of moral conscience in the post-war western canon of policy making, waiting for a moment when collective polities will attract leaders with enough emotional intelligence to honour its legacy appropriately, in word and deed.
The world’s best-documented mass murder is still regurgitating secrets, influencing culture, language, medicine, religion, ethics and morality, drawing crowds to probe pruriently its unfathomable horror; simultaneously denied and diluted by anti-Semites, and exploited by populists. The Holocaust, the most extreme expression of identity politics, continues to be politicised, its victims – Jews, homosexuals, people with intellectual disabilities, so-called asocials, Roma and Sinti – destined not to rest in peace.
However, for Jews, most of the Holocaust happened beyond Auschwitz. By January 1942, 2 million were murdered in Eastern Europe in the Holocaust by bullets, including Pawel Rozenfeld, my maternal grandfather. The unnatural, calculated cruelty visited on European Jewry can also be observed at Belzec, a little-known site in southeastern Poland, the size of Dublin’s Merrion Square. The first of the Reinhard camps, named after Reinhard Heydrich, Belzec was designed to kill with maximum efficiency; Sobibor and Treblinka would follow. Belzec operated from March to December 1942, slaughtering some 450,000 Jews by carbon monoxide gas. Operations ceased because Belzec had fulfilled its objective, killing all the Jews in the catchment area of Lublin, Lviv, Krakow and Tarnow, from where family members of my adoptive grandfather, Jakub Wandstein, were deported. He lost everyone including his pregnant wife.
There were only seven survivors, slaves forced to run the camp, and a single testimony. Rudolf Reder, a 61-year-old factory owner from Lviv, maintained the machinery. His wife and two children had already been gassed before his own deportation. When the camp closed, Reder escaped and survived in hiding before emigrating to Toronto. His harrowing testimony describes the structure, process and cruelty of industrialised murder, including recounting the stricken cries of children. One lone voice. Belzec, the epitome of genocide, a complex legal definition devised by Rafael Lemkin in 1942, to describe the deliberate destruction of an entire people, a term which has since been abused, amplifying division instead of delivering justice.
As for the Holocaust, we must continue to confront its horror, not in any expectation that we will learn lessons; we never do. But to learn facts, to confirm in our minds that these events did happen and to confirm in our souls that we are related, genetically and behaviourally, to both victims and perpetrators. To acknowledge that the crimes of the Holocaust were committed by our kith and kin is to fire the starting pistol in the race to salvation. We must continue to study the Holocaust because it represents the entirety of the human condition and, at its core, the mystery of the human heart, red and black. Like the wider universe, it is at once observable and unknowable. To paraphrase Viktor Frankl, it is not the discovery of meaning that counts, but the search for it.
Fintan O’Toole joins Oliver Sears in a conversation moderated by Dr Zuleika Rodgers on Monday January 27th at 6.30pm in the Edmund Burke Theatre, Trinity College Dublin. Tickets from holocaustawarenessireland.com/ourevents
- Listen to our Inside Politics Podcast for the latest analysis and chat
- Sign up for push alerts and have the best news, analysis and comment delivered directly to your phone
- Find The Irish Times on WhatsApp and stay up to date
