Legacy Matters

Negative Cathedral

"Too much has been said about Auschwitz -- and yet not enough" writes Adam Zagajewski in today's Wall Street Journal. (link requires subscription)

For somebody who, like the present writer, lives in Krakow, only 40 miles from Auschwitz, it's certainly not an academic, abstract matter. The camp exerts a special attraction for all kinds of tourists, some of them shallow, some not, but who'd criticize it -- to have this place abandoned and forgotten (or perhaps "recycled") would have been truly disheartening. The modest city of Oswiecim lives next to the camp museum, not unlike the provincial city of Chartres dwarfed by its cathedral. The huge difference being of course that the Auschwitz monument is one of suffering and horror, it is a negative cathedral, so to speak; no spires greet the pilgrims from afar, we're in a flat landscape here. This is not an architectural landmark. Memory is not visible. We're here in the shabbiest museum of the world.

Still, the memory of Auschwitz and the other death camps lives on in the writings of survivors even as they are dying the natural deaths of old age.  Eamonn Fitzgerald over at Rainy Day believes in Remembering to not forget.   

What was it like to experience the unimaginable? Rainy Day recommends If This Is a Man, Primo Levi's account of the time he spent as a prisoner at Auschwitz. After reading Levi, one understands why some people would want to deny the Holocaust. The wickedness involved defies comprehension and suggests that "civilization" is but a veneer, and a thin one at that.

For the rest of the week, in remembrance of the liberation of Auschwitz, Rainy Day will be presenting diary entries written during the Second World War by those who were either caught up in the Nazi murder machine or by those who oiled it. We begin with an example of the latter. Why? Well, in the last few years Germany has witnessed a return of a specious 1950s theory that presents the perpetrators as victims. Actually, in this revisionist scenario the enablers of Auschwitz are double victims, first of Hitler the Great Seducer, and secondly of the Allied air campaign that destroyed the supply chains that filled the railway cars that delivered the men, women and children from all over Europe to the death factories.

Yesterday, a diary excerpt from Josef Goebbels, Hitler's Minister of Propaganda; today, diary excerpts from Edith Velmans who escaped the death camps by hiding with a Christian family for three years.  An immigrant to the U.S. she published her diary, Edith's Book, in 1998, about how she survived the war.

Reading these diary excerpts Eamonn presents gives you such a picture of those times through the accumulation of small details that you begin to understand the  power of being your own personal historian.  Any single day of your life if laid out with detail will be fascinating in 50 years time.  God forbid that you ever must endure such horrors.