by Cory Gallant

Created on: May 24, 2007   Last Updated: December 20, 2009

On the Death of Millions

In recent years, many doubts have been fashioned as to the credibility of certain historical events. For instance, it is the judgment of many skeptical citizens of this planet that our beloved heroes, Neil Armstrong and Edwin E. "Buzz" Aldrin, did not actually walk on the moon in the summer of 1969. Exceedingly more heinous a belief than that, however, is the conviction that the Holocaust never happened.

"Anyone who has been tortured remains tortured. Anyone who has suffered torture never again will be able to be at ease in the world, the abomination of the annihilation is never extinguished. Faith in humanity, already cracked by the first slap in the face, then demolished by torture, is never acquired again." - Jean Amry

For Amry, an Austrian philosopher, torture proved to be an incessant demise. In the times of Hitler's occupation of Germany, the Gestapo tortured Amry for being an active participant in the Belgian resistance. He was then deported to Auschwitz when they discovered he was Jewish. Amry survived Auschwitz only to commit suicide in 1978, more than thirty years after the liberation of the death camp, as a result of his constant torment. The destiny was analogous for countless survivors of the Lagers, or extermination camps.

In Primo Levi's book, The Drowned and the Saved, he elucidates how vital it was to have knowledge of the German language while in Auschwitz. Levi tells of the time when he convinced an Alsatian to teach him the German language. The instruction would commence at curfew and persisted until the moment that Levi and his Alsatian companion submitted to slumber. Levi remunerated his educator by supplying him with a portion of bread, and Levi believed that "never was bread better spent."

On the subject of communication, or rather the lack thereof, Levi alludes to the story of Hurbinek, a three-year old boy, perchance born surreptitiously in Auschwitz, who had never been taught to speak. One cannot fathom any other place in this universe where such an atrocity could be allowed to take place: a child of three years old, mute and starving. It is an upshot of horrors such as this that Levi so aptly gave Auschwitz the epithet "the gates of hell."

To this day, the number of deaths caused by the SS in the Nazi extermination camps, such as Auschwitz, and the ghettos, such as Warsaw and Lodz, are unknown, however, the most commonly heard estimates are four, six, or eight million people. To put that into perspective,

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