A visit to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp is fundamental in order to try to understand the human condition. At the infamous site of death, as the regime did at other installations such as Treblinka, Nazi Germany crafted the most efficient annihilation machine in history and unleashed it mainly against the Jewish population of Europe with the intention of eliminating it. The effectiveness of the killing enterprise meant that entire towns and regions were wiped out in a matter of days, or weeks. In total some six million Jews, two-thirds of their European population, were decimated in just a few years as SS Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler orchestrated the “final solution to the Jewish problem.”
Eighty years since the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, and just days after the death of Pope Francis (who paid his own visit to the camp in 2016), it is absolutely relevant to revisit the importance of the Shoah, as the Holocaust is known to Jews, particularly given the current escalation of global conflict. There’s a war waging in Eastern Europe after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sparked a protracted conflict that has roped in NATO, while Israel is engaged with Hamas and the broader sphere of Iranian influence in the Middle East. The United States is locked in a dangerous power struggle with China, exacerbated by Donald Trump’s unpredictability.
It was in this context that an Argentine delegation flew to Poland this week to see what bred the horror first-hand. We were at the Jewish cemetery near the Warsaw Ghetto a few days earlier, when we found out about the passing of Francis, a situation that generated all sorts of tensions and emotions. A group of journalists were among those invited to join the delegation, which was to attend the March of the Living at Auschwitz-Birkenau just a few days later. The trip, coordinated together with the Holocaust Museum in Buenos Aires, took us to Warsaw and Krakow, visiting the Jewish quarters to understand the context of the Nazi decision to exterminate the Jews, and then to Treblinka and Auschwitz-Birkenau to see how the death machine actually worked and how the victims battled to remain human. We were joined by Holocaust survivor Rosa Rotemberg, with whom we visited the nearby orphanage where her parents smuggled her out of to escape near-certain death. We later found out how, eight decades later, she had finally managed to discover her estranged mother’s final resting site.
Multiple facets of humanity intensely came to the fore as we visited the historical locations. The cold and calculating efficiency of a system of death created to comply with Adolf Hitler’s vision of a Jew-free world was brought down to Earth by a series of sadistic and brutal characters who took advantage of the opportunity. At Treblinka, an extermination camp in the outskirts of Warsaw, some 900,000 people were murdered, essentially exterminating the whole Jewish population of the Polish capital. The camp was run by about 50 German officers and aided by some 100 Ukrainian guards, who shepherded 60-cart cattle trains of people past a false train station built to deceive the victims into thinking there could be some fate for them other than death. They were instructed to leave their belongings on the platform and told they’d be given a shower to improve hygiene, after leaving behind the harrowing conditions of the ghetto. After undressing, they were sent into a large cement room without windows and the door was locked behind them.
The gas chamber was connected to diesel engines of tractors and tanks, where groups of around 300 men, women and children were exterminated in minutes using the exhaust fumes, after which a team of enslaved Jews known as ‘sonderkommando’ piled up bodies to be burnt to ashes in outdoor grills that resemble Argentine parrillas. At times, the crematorium worked 24/7. These installations were rudimentary compared to Auschwitz-Birkenau but extremely effective: the whole process didn’t take more than an hour and a half from the moment prisoners were dragged off of the trains. Their illusions of survival were wickedly deceived by the cynical sham fake train station, where the clock always marked 4:15pm, as the Nazis utilised the power of hope to keep the wretched under control, feeding the savage satisfaction of their officials as they subjugated the supposed inferior race.
It should come as no surprise that it was generally the Sonderkommando, the Jewish prisoners in charge of the crematoriums where they exterminated their brothers and sisters, who led the revolts at the extermination camps. While at Auschwitz-Birkenau there was little hope of surviving — 1.1 million people were murdered there from 1942 to 1944 — on October 10, 1944, a Sonderkommando unit managed to detonate a homemade explosive and blow up the entrance to crematorium IV. They stole weapons and grenades from injured guards and used them to trash the cremation ovens. They had meticulously gathered tiny bits of powder over several months, smuggled in by female inmates that worked at a nearby munitions facility. This act of defiance was brutally punished by the Nazis, who hunted down the Sonderkommando and snuffed out four women responsible for the smuggling — their names were Ester Wajcblum, Ella Gartner, and Regina Safirsztain. They were savagely tortured at the infamous block 11 building and then hung. It was the last execution of Jews at Auschwitz-Birkenau, as Russians liberated the camp just a few weeks later, in January, 1945. They never gave away the names of their fellow prisoners. Even at the worst moments, there were small acts of resistance: Salman Gradovsky, a Sonderkommando who managed to gains access to paper and a piece of pencil, wrote detailed accounts of what happened at crematorium IV, hiding his work by scattering it throughout Birkenau; David Olesker, an artist, left behind precise images of the death machine, concealed elsewhere in the camp. It is thanks to these people, and others, that we have a pretty complete idea of what happened there.
These savage acts of brutality, together with the symbolic but persistent moments of resistance, puts the focus on the ethical dilemma of choice. At what point were Nazi officials simply carrying out orders, or did they actively decide to participate in genocide? To what extent can the Sonderkommando or even the Kapo (Jewish prisoners who collaborated with the Nazis by leading barracks and gaining certain benefits) be considered collaborators? Where shall we draw the line between heroic resistance in the face of certain death, and the passive acceptance of subjugation at a camp like Auschwitz-Birkenau?
From Primo Levi to Viktor Frankl, one conclusion seems to be that clinging on to the human condition, resisting the push to become a soulless body, waiting to be marched into the crematorium, represented a fundamental act of resistance. Yearning for survival, even in the smallest acts such as washing one’s face with soiled water in an attempt to clean up after oneself, represented a fundamental act of resistance. It also took resilience, as it was only a few that managed to retain the will to live.
Silence is a common reaction among the groups of people visiting the extermination sites, as they seek to comprehend what actually happened there and why. Pope Francis understood this when he visited Auschwitz-Birkenau in July 2016. He visited cell 18 in block 11 where Maximilian Kolbe, a Franciscan priest, was murdered by starvation. Kolbe volunteered to give his life in exchange for a Polish prisoner who was selected to be executed days before his release date as part of a group punishment after an unidentified theft of food in a barracks. This was the kind of senseless and extreme reality that occurred in Nazi camps. Throughout his two-hour visit, the generally verbose Francis remained in silence, acknowledging that words were meaningless in the presence of such barbarity. His Papacy was marked by an attempt to intervene in some of the major crises affecting humanity in the XXI century, including climate, migration, inequality, and multiple armed conflicts. While he wasn’t always successful, Francis did manage to become a moral lighthouse of sorts, always trying to put the focus on those suffering unfairly.
There is definitely a sense today that the world is inching dangerously closer to the brink, with many making references to the pre-war climate of the 1930s. It should be noted that Hitler, an eccentric outsider initially disregarded by the elite, was somehow legally appointed Chancellor by 1933. He edged out Paul von Hindenburg and eventually consolidated his dictatorial power as the Führer. Hitler then pushed Europe into a world war that roped in the United States and Japan, leading to the death of more than 80 million people. World War II saw the brutality of Hitler’s “Final Solution” but also the unleashing of two atomic bombs, granting the human species the capacity to destroy itself for the first time in history.
Is it fair to compare our era to that moment, one of humanity’s darkest? It feels a bit extreme, but the rise of the “new right” has breathed strong wind into the wings of polarisation, while certain leaders begin to exhibit disdain for constitutional democracy and increasing authoritativeness. Donald Trump’s return to the White House after having incited the January 6 rioters who stormed the Capitol, essentially refusing to acknowledge defeat in 2021, marks a dangerous precedent that has already been imitated. His unpredictability could embolden dictatorships like Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Xi Jinping’s China who have already made their own land grabs. Back to the Middle East, the cowardly terrorist attacks of October 7, 2023, has een the government of Benjamin Netanyahu respond by razing Gaza to the ground, seeking to eradicate the terrorist threat of Hamas, causing a deep humanitarian crisis and tens of thousands of civilian casualties that should’ve been minimised. Both Eastern Europe and the Middle East could quickly flare up into larger conflicts that could escalate into global conflicts, while a miscalculation in the South China Sea could push the two largest global economies into a military confrontation.
At this potentially dark hour, the Holocaust should serve as a message of what could lie ahead, if we continue fan the flames of hatred and fear. Pope Francis’ legacy of empathy and dialogue show us a way out of this labyrinth. Everyone should visit Auschwitz-Birkenau.
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