Letter to South Africa from Auschwitz-Birkenau

It has been pointed out by others that within living memory, Europe was the heart of darkness. So-called civilised Europeans, who read Goethe and listened to Beethoven, set about exterminating millions of their fellow human beings. These commentators also point out that in Africa no gas chambers and ovens were ever built, and some go as far as to say the Holocaust is proof that the white man is the most evil creature ever to stalk the earth.

This seems to me a zero-sum game. It may quite rightly serve to knock the self-righteous cultural superiority that many Europeans feel off its pedestal (and there is some satisfaction in that), but no racial judgement is valid. Had the technology and the means been available in Rwanda, might it not have been used by Africans? Is it any better to use a panga instead of a revolver? To herd people into a church and burn them to death instead of suffocating them with gas?

Yesterday I visited the preserved remains of the concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau near Krakow. One goes to such a place with some trepidation.

Memorial plaques in numerous languages representing the countries from where most of the victims came, tell us the place shall forever be a cry of despair and a reminder of what was done here. It is one of the world’s great monuments to manunkind; an industrial abattoir for processing human beings in the way we process cattle.

It’s all been said before of course, but I am constantly surprised by how little people know; so perhaps I best make no assumptions and set out in one paragraph the basic facts about this place.

Established by the German Third Reich in 1941, by the end of World War II about one million Jewish people were murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau, along with one hundred thousand Poles, Roma and Soviet POWs. These figures represent 90% of the people deported to the camp, almost all murdered within hours of arrival in purpose-built, sound-proof gas chambers each of which could kill 2 000 people at once (there were five of these built in 1942/3, working to capacity to kill the 400 000 Hungarian Jews sent there). Over 200 000 children, including babies and toddlers, were gassed along with the adults. Those not selected on the railway platform for immediate murder were kept for slave labour. At one time over 95 000 prisoners. No real attempt was made to keep the inmates alive as is plain to see from the conditions of their confinement. The intention was to work them to death in a few months. Most women lasted three or four months; men a little longer. The Nazis sorted their victims’ few worldly possessions for reuse by German citizens and then processed the bodies; extracted gold from the teeth; turned their hair into textiles for German uniforms, used the fat of their bodies for fuel to burn more bodies, and used children for vivisection — grotesque medical experiments that were usually fatal.

Meticulous records were kept. Every detail thought out. Every train ticket was paid for using confiscated property from the Jews. The gas chambers, the buildings, even the torture, suffocation and starvation cells were insured by Allianz.

When I arrive at the gates, my senses are heightened by the anxiety of visiting such a notorious place. I am sure I smell burning. Then I realise it is the smell of coaches, rows of them filled with tourists from all over the world. Many are German; many are school tours.

What the Soviet army found on liberating the camp has been preserved in the museum. In various displays behind glass: mounds of prosthetic limbs and crutches removed before their owners were gassed; thousands of suitcases with the names of their victims; a mountain of shoes; in a separate display, a pyramid of children’s shoes that would otherwise have been lost in the scale of the former display; two tons of human hair (representing how many people? and still only a fraction of all the hair shaved). And a heap of tangled, wire spectacle frames and shattered lenses. It is not possible to see through those eyeglasses, but one’s imagination does not disappoint.

The story of Auschwitz-Birkenau is known because it was the biggest of these facilities in central Europe, and secondly because many of the victims sent there and its survivors were educated, middle class, and Westernized. The great majority of the six-million Holocaust victims were Eastern European Jews, more “rural” and from the shtetels, killed well before Auschwitz was at its murderous peak.

Auschwitz was one of 2 000 concentration camps on Polish soil alone.

But the hardships didn’t end here. Camp survivors faced further tragedy when they returned home. In one of the most notorious incidents in Kielce, a nine-year-old who had gone to visit relatives for a few days in the countryside without informing his parents, to avoid being disciplined, said he’d been kidnapped. He pointed to a Jewish house. The militia was called. Rumours flew that Jews were kidnapping children. By the end of it the mob had killed 40 Jews for no reason other than their “race”.

And this very morning, I hear on the radio the French rightwing, following the shootings in Toulouse, shouting that there are too many immigrants and they “are killing our children”. After Auschwitz, after apartheid, I think we should take even the stupidest politician seriously.

Krakow is an odd place, surviving so much off holocaust tourism. Yet the Poles see themselves as primary victims too. One in every five of its nation was killed in the war, higher than any other country. In the brief period Hitler and Stalin’s pact held (before Hitler attacked Russia), the two conquerors divided up Poland. Seven Polish villages were cleared to make space for Birkenau alone. The Soviets set up concentration camps of their own, deporting in cattle trucks — as the Nazis did — over a million Poles and “class enemies”. Both the communists and the fascists committed genocide with the express purpose of destroying Polish society and culture. The Soviets shot thousands and their camps too were factories for human extermination, without gas chambers, but with snow and starvation and gallows. After the war under Soviet rule the Poles were forbidden to speak about the mass murder of their people.

Standing on the bleak railway platform at Birkenau where the victims arrived, my jeans are sopping wet from driving rain, and tiny hail stones sting may face and hands. Yet we persist with the tour. I think of what it must have been to be in nothing more than thin prison pyjamas. We dash to one of the prison barracks.

Inside, the guide continues. Until now, he has not told me anything I didn’t already know. Then he tells me that Hugo Boss designed Nazi SS uniforms and used slave labour in one of its factories. I am not wearing my Hugo Boss shoes today; they are waiting for me in my hotel room.

Auschwitz-Birkenau effects us all and in unexpected ways. We had newspapers in South Africa at the time denying the persecution of the Jews. We had a government which, unlike Australia and other commonwealth nations, shamefully refused to admit Jewish refugees who fled these unspeakable horrors, while sending missions to collect Nazi orphans, one of whom grew up to be Dr [Death] Lothar Neethling.

Horrors such as this could arise anywhere the state is allowed to have its way with us.

I also have the uncomfortable realisation standing in that camp that the Nazis were not defeated because of what they were doing to the Jews. Their frightfulness galvanised morale against them, but the Allies had their own reasons for the war. And Stalin and his genocidal forces got away with it.

Why should it not therefore happen again in a new disguise. Why not in the US where they now plan to police their citizens with the drones they use in Afghanistan? Where it is now legal to detain US citizens indefinitely without trial and even execute them without judicial process? And are there not already massive privatised prison populations?

And today it came to light here in the local newspapers a scandal that Poland’s secret services allowed rendition flights by the CIA and torture on Polish soil.

Why could it not happen in South Africa? We had apartheid for over 40 years. We now have moves afoot to limit freedom of speech; where laws, political rhetoric and social attitudes are still formed by race; where the security establishment is seeking to consolidate itself beyond our purview.

There is a reason we have the Constitution we have, and Auschwitz and apartheid are among those reasons. It is to ensure that the state will never be allowed to perpetrate injustices that even remotely resemble Auschwitz, for that is where it can end.

The world is entering a dark period once more. With the economy collapsing, fascists are on the rise all over Europe.

Here in Krakow I went to see one of the poorer outlying city neighbourhoods. I soon felt very uncomfortable in my bright red shoes on a street with loutish skinheads in jackboots, possibly drunk, belligerent, and unemployed. I took the first tram out.

Governments must never be allowed to think of us citizens as units, as problems that need solutions, forgetting that we are individuals with rights. We talk of “squatters” and “street children”, of “illegal immigrants” and “Zimbabweans”, and we forget that behind each one is an individual’s story and a life. That is how injustice and cruelty starts.

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