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, that is almost the entire population of New York City. Those eight million people, however, were not only Jews. They were also Russian soldiers, Gypsies, disabled people, diseased people, anti-fascists and other political prisoners, Muslims, homosexuals, and many other groups and religious sects that went against what Hitler wanted.
What did Hitler want? He wanted Germany to integrate all German-speaking regions including those in adjacent countries. Our good friend Adolf believed that the world should be separated into races. Aryans, the "master race", would include Germans, Scandinavians, and Britons. The depraved "Alpine" race would consist of the French and Italians. The " inferior race" consisted of Russian and eastern European Slavs who would be the slaves of the master race. Last, and certainly least, were those awful, cheap, money-hungry Jews, who were the cause of all of Germany's problems, including their defeat in World War I.
"The weekly hour when our "political" companions received mail from home was for us [the Jews] the saddest, when we felt the whole burden of being different, estranged, cut off from our country, indeed from the human race. It was the hour when we felt the tattoo burn like a wound, and the certainty that none us would return overwhelmed us like an avalanche of mud. In any case, even if we had been allowed to write a letter to whom would we have addressed it? The families of the Jews of Europe had been submerged or dispersed or destroyed." ~Primo Levi
The Jews received the harshest treatment at most of the extermination camps. At Auschwitz, the Special Squads, which were mainly comprised of Jewish people, were the prisoners who were in charge of putting the dead bodies of the gas victims into the crematoria. As Levi so brusquely put it, "It must be the Jews who put the Jews into the ovens."
Famine, starvation, beatings, slaughter, rape, the destruction of families, mutilation, destruction of values and morals, and dehumanization: these were the results for millions of people in the 1940's as a result of the Holocaust. But who am I kidding? None of that ever really happened, right?