ROTHENBURGER: A visit to Auschwitz and a question — could it happen again?

Visitors, like us, who were there one week ago, walk the narrow streets beside the tall reinforced concrete fence posts strung with barbed wire, pause at the shooting wall and the roll call square, view the rudimentary latrines and crowded bunks and straw beds used by prisoners in the barracks, descend the narrow steps to the starvation cells, see piles of prosthetics, clothing, eyeglasses, combs and suitcases taken from prisoners for shipment back to Germany, and bales of human hair — two tons worth — to be made into socks and mattress stuffing. (The warehouses in which the belongings were stored were nicknamed Kanada, the German spelling of Canada, apparently in a dark-humour reference to a country that was believed to be a land of plenty.)

They jostle with each other for cellphone photos, listen to their guides with their Vox Boxes, and look at photos of those who died there.

Many who visit the site remark on the massive scale of it — 346 acres, 300 buildings, 10 miles of barbed wire. By the time it was shut down, the complex that includes the neighbouring Birkenau death camp held the equivalent of the entire population of Kamloops.

At Birkenau, they enter the wooden barracks where so many died from disease, overwork, brutality or starvation, and walk the tracks to the train platform where Jews were disembarked and separated into two rows, one for those deemed young enough and strong enough to work, and one for those who would be sent straight to the gas chambers — the elderly, frail, disabled, pregnant women and mothers with children or babies.

Standing in one of those eerie chambers, in which the Nazis dumped Zyklon B poisonous gas through slits in the ceiling to kill the prisoners, and at the ovens where the bodies of victims were disposed of (the three ovens in Crematorium 1 could burn 340 bodies in 24 hours), is what stays with me the most. The enormity of what went on there, of being in the exact place where so many were murdered, is something I won’t ever forget.

More than a million people were killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau, by far most of them Jews as part of Hitler’s “Final Solution.” But there were political prisoners, non-Jewish Poles, Romani (Gypsies), pacifists, gays and prisoners of war, too.

You can feel the presence of ghosts there, can hear the screams of children, the cries of the doomed as they begged for mercy where there was none.

The year I was born, a 25-year-old Polish man named Ludwig Vesely, prisoner number 38169, perished at Auschwitz. I knew nothing about him when I found his photo hanging on a wall with a few hundred others in one of the original Auschwitz buildings — I was curious about him only because of when he died.

He stares expressionless at the camera, his head shaven, his prisoner number stitched onto his shirt below a triangle patch. Interestingly, the shirt is not the usual striped cloth of the camp uniform.

A bit of diligent online research shows that he was a member of the Austrian resistance who had been imprisoned in the Dachau concentration camp in Bavaria before Auschwitz. Two years after his “deportation,” that is, incarceration, in Auschwitz, he and some other resistance members planned an escape but were betrayed and tortured. On Dec. 30, 1944, 28 days before Auschwitz was liberated, they were hanged in the roll call square.

His last words on the scaffold were recalled by survivors as, “Heute wir, morgen ihr!” or “Today us, tomorrow you!”

Many of the death books kept by the SS (Schutzstaffel, the Nazi Party’s political soldiers) were destroyed before the camp was liberated and many prisoners weren’t afforded even the small dignity of a recorded death anyway, being sent to the gas chambers the day they got there.

On the way out of Auschwitz, we see the gallows to which SS Officer Rudolph Hoess, the longest-serving camp commandant, was sent after testifying at Nuremburg, acknowledging days before his execution that he had “sinned gravely against humanity.” Ludwig Vesely’s final words turned out to be prophetic but so many other members of the SS who were guilty of atrocities were never brought to justice.

I think about the fact that, as I was beginning life, Ludwig Vesely and six million others in Hitler’s many Holocaust camps were losing theirs in such terrible ways. How lucky I am to have been born and lived in a democracy that values the life and freedom of the individual above all things.

Today, on Remembrance Day, we’re supposed to remember and cherish those who fought to free the world from all that is represented by the horrors of Auschwitz. Instead of demolishing this place of cruelty and death, Poland preserved it as the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum to remind us not to let it happen again.

Yet, incredibly, rallies and radicals are renewing the call for the extermination of Jews with chants like “gas the Jews” and “F— the Jews.” Antisemitism is soaring in Canada and elsewhere, especially since Hamas.

Philosopher George Santayana is credited with the famous saying, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” I have to wonder, could Auschwitz happen again?

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Mel Rothenburger is a regular contributor to CFJC Today, publishes the ArmchairMayor.ca opinion website, and is a recipient of the Jack Webster Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award. He has served as mayor of Kamloops, school board chair and TNRD director, and is a retired daily newspaper editor. He can be reached at mrothenburger@armchairmayor.ca.

Editor’s Note: This opinion piece reflects the views of its author, and does not necessarily represent the views of CFJC Today or Pattison Media.

by Mel Rothenburger

ROTHENBURGER: A visit to Auschwitz and a question — could it happen again?

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