I cannot commemorate Rabbit Hole Day.
Jan. 27th, 2005 01:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
heidiNot this year, and probably not any year. It's not you. It's me. It's history, and the faliability and fluke-ness of birthdays (my grandfather's would've been tomorrow - my mother in law's is on Saturday).
Today is the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, which is correctly recognized as the worst of the Nazi death camps. One point five million people were murdered there - many by poison gas, some in executions by machine guns, others in grotestque pseudo-medical projects which I cannot bear to call experiments.
My grandfather was a US Army surgeon, and he was among those who, in the Spring of 1945, liberated Bergen Belsen. He had a photo-camera and over the weeks he spent there, healing those who'd been tortured by the Nazis, he took photographs of the atrocities, then, when he arrived home, hid the images in his attic. About 12 years later, my mother found them, and asked him about them. He couldn't answer - and the photographs disapeared. My grandfather died when I was almost five, so I was never able to ask him myself about the horror. It wasn't until 1994 when I first went to the Holocaust Museum in DC that I was able to truly look at the images, rather than read the words, and even try to think about the horror and the murder.
It's hard for me to find the right words from myself, so I will primarily link to, and paste in, words by others.
Rabbi Emanuel Feldman writes of lessons that humanity must always remember.
Tony Blair reminds us of how it began: ... the Holocaust did not start with a concentration camp. It started with a brick through the shopwindow of a Jewish business, the desecration of a Synagogue, the shout of racist abuse on the street.
The Soviet soldiers who were part of the liberation tell their stories.
And Elie Weisel, Auschwitz survivor:
Look at the images. Read the words. Even 60 years on, when the fact of the Holocaust is something we know from our childhoods, we cannot be the same after looking at the results of malice and evil. We cannot be lost.
Today is the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, which is correctly recognized as the worst of the Nazi death camps. One point five million people were murdered there - many by poison gas, some in executions by machine guns, others in grotestque pseudo-medical projects which I cannot bear to call experiments.
My grandfather was a US Army surgeon, and he was among those who, in the Spring of 1945, liberated Bergen Belsen. He had a photo-camera and over the weeks he spent there, healing those who'd been tortured by the Nazis, he took photographs of the atrocities, then, when he arrived home, hid the images in his attic. About 12 years later, my mother found them, and asked him about them. He couldn't answer - and the photographs disapeared. My grandfather died when I was almost five, so I was never able to ask him myself about the horror. It wasn't until 1994 when I first went to the Holocaust Museum in DC that I was able to truly look at the images, rather than read the words, and even try to think about the horror and the murder.
It's hard for me to find the right words from myself, so I will primarily link to, and paste in, words by others.
Rabbi Emanuel Feldman writes of lessons that humanity must always remember.
Tony Blair reminds us of how it began: ... the Holocaust did not start with a concentration camp. It started with a brick through the shopwindow of a Jewish business, the desecration of a Synagogue, the shout of racist abuse on the street.
The Soviet soldiers who were part of the liberation tell their stories.
And Elie Weisel, Auschwitz survivor:
How can you go away with the knowledge you gathered here and remain the same? If you will be the same after this, we will be lost.
Look at the images. Read the words. Even 60 years on, when the fact of the Holocaust is something we know from our childhoods, we cannot be the same after looking at the results of malice and evil. We cannot be lost.
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(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-28 09:28 am (UTC)At Auschwitz we visited the gas chamber and the crematory and the Black Wall and the displays of the personal belongings confiscated. Then we took a bus to Birkenau and saw the barracks and the guard towers and I walked down the train track that runs through the middle of the complex to the platform where people were either sent to the gas chambers or to the work camps. The gas chamber was destroyed during the liberation. It was a beautiful day, warm and sunny, and I sat under a tree near the collapsed gas chamber and the monument to the victims and prayed and just wondered how. It was one of most difficult things I've ever done, but I walked away a different person and I'm so thankful that I've had the experience.
An aside: people live in sight of Birkenau. I don't know how I could live if the view out the window was a concentration camp.