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Auschwitz ironies: Where the devil once danced, dust remains

This was my first trip to what has to have been the closest place to hell on earth. It was worse than I imagined.

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execution wall at Auschwitz

This was my first trip to what has to have been the closest place to hell on earth. It was worse than I imagined. Almost 10,000 acres of what Dante must have foreseen as he wrote Inferno. Evil lived in the marrow of this land.

For any basic student of history, the horrors of the Holocaust are known. Yet when you’re actually here, walking the paths of pain that parallel with railroad tracks of wrath, the sickening facts not only slap one right between the eyes. Those facts also fill the ventricles of the emotional heart.

Irony is all around. A restaurant stands just outside the main entrance. Not one but two snack bars are outside the inner gate where more than a million Jews were rationed to 500 calories a day, a meal, often of lice-laden bread and some form of liquid the German soldiers tried to pass off a soup. Buses deposit thousands of people every day on this site. The ages of the visitors I saw ranged from 9 to 90. I heard languages from Latvia to Luxemburg, from Austin, Texas, to Austria, even Canadian and Spanish from Columbia. Without knowing the specifics of a given syllable, one knows what is being said. Hatred knows no border of language or location.

I’m here with a group from the Jewish Federation of Broward County, Fla. WRAL-TV General Manager Steve Hammel was told of this trip and decided he and his wife would join the group. They’re here to listen and learn and to walk. Thursday all of us in the group will join some 12,000 others in the 30th Annual March for the Living. My job is to also listen and learn and document what we are experiencing. Thirteen years ago, I visited the Dachau concentration camp outside of Munich, Germany. Moved to tears and haunted for years, I knew one day my travels would complete this odyssey in Poland.

So here I am. Where there is no doubt the devil danced like hell.

More irony. The sign over the entrance reads: Arbett Mach Fret. Translation, “Work Will Set You Free.” The letter B in the word Arbett is upside down. An 88 year old who spent time in these buildings told me, “I think it was a sign to the rest of us.”

The sign over the entrance at Auschwitz reads: "Arbett Mach Fret." Translation, "Work Will Set You Free."

I asked Irene Zisblatt why.

“Who do you think built that? The Jews," she said. "They made us do all sorts of things. I think it was a warning for those of us who came after them.”

Michal Donegal is our guide on this April morning. In the sunlight this 28 year old looks younger. His voice, however, welling with emotional determination to enlighten, lets each of us know he is wise beyond his years.

Reverently, he leads our procession into the camp. Again, irony. A camp? CAMP? Really? Shouldn’t that word represent fun and laughter? There are no tents. No games. No swimming pools. Only pools of pain with no shallow water.

The Germans saved shoes from Holocaust victims to reuse the leather and rubber soles.

We quietly shuffle from room to room. Immediately it becomes hard to even pick up your feet to move. Triple wooden bunk beds where five to a mattress slept. Irene pointed and said, “If one of us had to turn over we ALL had to turn over.” Clothes of the prisoners. Striped uniforms all with the yellow JUDE star. Then the shoes. Thousands of shoes. The Germans wanted to harvest the leather and the rubber soles. Pumps, sandals, boots, orthopedic shoes and, most painful of all, baby shoes. Shoes replaced by sandals and clogs. Not exactly the best for mud and 20-degree weather.

The displays teeter on becoming overwhelming. Hundreds of pair of eyeglasses. Enough suitcases to fill a warehouse. Suitcases with names and addresses. The owners believed the SS when they were told they would return home one day.

“Even though they broke down our door during Passover and said ‘Jews get out, now’ my 13-year-old mind thought we would come home,” Zisblatt said. She found out quickly how wrong she was.

More clothes. Tiny baby clothes from tiny, little people. Then we turn in the hallway and are standing in front of a display of human hair. Hundreds of pounds or human hair. My God.

Can it get worse?

We walked down steps. Concrete worn from all the steps before us. There we are shown single cells. A starvation cell. An isolation cell. A dark cell. All self-explanatory. Then we stand in front of the standing cell. One meter by one meter. A cell measuring 9.6 square feet. Four men would stand in that space. For three days. Naked. “They were stripped of their dignity as they were stripped of what little clothing they were allowed to wear,” intoned Michal. He added, “Often one of men collapsed before the time was finished.”

I touch the wall where over 200 in a single afternoon faced a firing squad. Attempts have been made to cover the bullet indentions. Those attempts failed.

Heads were shaved and uniforms distributed to men, women and children in the camps

We see rows and rows of pictures. All heads shaved. Men. Women. Children. Names. Ages. Occupations. And then to where all of the people, the human beings in those black and white photographs ended.

The gas chamber and ovens of the crematorium. For a moment I can’t take a deep breath. Even though the air I’m trying to breathe is clean, my heart is racing and I can’t get the beats and my breaths in sync.

With that, we leave Auschwitz Number One and head to Birkenau. It’s about a mile. We turn. There they are. The tracks. The railroad tracks that carried the train cars ferrying more than a million Jews to their final destination.

On these 346 acres 16 of the barracks still stand. The gas chambers are in ruins. Some by the Germans who wanted to destroy all evidence. Some by the prisoners as they were liberated. These are what’s left of the networks of killing machines that once annihilated 2,000 Jews a day.

“Some of the women smuggled in gunpowder and blew up this death chamber.” Avi Marcovitz is a scholar of Holocaust studies. “These Jews were not like lambs led to the slaughter. They often fought back. Here’s some of the evidence.” The ovens are now reduced to rubble.

The crematories at Auschwitz are in ruins.

The irony of what once turned the bodies of murdered Jews to ash would now lie in its own dust.

After hours of trying to comprehend all I’ve seen and heard, everything inside me wants to scream, “How could this happen? Why did the world turn a blind eye and allow this to happen?”

Then I learn it was no accident. The Final Solution didn’t happen in a vacuum. It was planned. Carefully. Meticulously. Maliciously.

All of the buildings required architects. Engineers. Electricians. Brick masons. Plumbers. SKILLED talent. Chemists for the poisons. Doctors for the heinous experiments. Nurses. Cooks for the Germans.

And don’t forget the ovens.

Ovens.

Crematory devices.

The ovens at Auschwitz were guaranteed for 75 years.

To reduce bones and flesh to nothing more than dust. (Dust, by the way, later sold to farmers as fertilizer).

The ovens were put out for bids. BIDS! The contract was awarded to a company named Tofts. Testimony at Nuremburg revealed Tofts ovens came with a 75-year warranty. Maybe the irony of all irony. 75 years. What more can be said.

As Marcovitz lamented, “The company was void of business ethics and exhibited a total lack of humanity.”

Ellie Wiesel wrote that Holocaust is a word that cannot be defined beyond evil. As I walk tomorrow, a non-Jew, a Christian among 12,000 people, the vast majority with a proud Jewish heritage, I will do so as a privileged minority. I will walk along those bearing scars deeper than I can ever possibly imagine. I too will be saying “Never Forget.”

Most importantly I will walk to honor the six million who died not because they ever tried to harm another. They died because someone said, “We don’t want you here.”

Irony. A word we hear today far too often.

Peace.

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