EIGHTY YEARS ago this week, the Soviet Army arrived at Auschwitz, the vast death camp established by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland. By that point, Markus Jakubovic — a Jewish 19-year-old from Czechoslovakia who would in time become my father — was no longer there. Two weeks earlier, the Germans had evacuated about 67,000 of the prisoners still remaining in Auschwitz, dispatching them on brutal — and, for many, fatal — forced marches to the west. My father was part of a group sent into Austria. He ended up at the concentration camp in Ebensee, which would not be liberated until May 9, with the arrival of US soldiers from the 80th Infantry Division of General Patton's Third Army.
My father had entered Auschwitz the previous spring, together with his parents, his two brothers, and two of his three sisters. They, too, were gone by the time the camp was liberated. Unlike my father, they didn't leave on foot. Like the overwhelming majority of the more than 1.1 million Jews who were sent to Auschwitz by the Nazis, they had been murdered in gas chambers and then incinerated in industrial-strength crematoria.
Jews were not the only victims at Auschwitz. About 70,000 Poles, more than 20,000 Roma, 15,000 Soviet POWs, and an estimated 12,000 individuals of other nationalities were murdered there as well. The Nazis first used the camp, in fact, as a prison for Polish dissidents, and Birkenau, the huge 1941 addition that became the main Auschwitz killing center, was originally designed to hold prisoners of war.
But beginning in the spring of 1942, Auschwitz became first and foremost a slaughterhouse for Jews. From almost every corner of Europe, Jews were sent there – from Ukraine in the east to France in the west, from as far south as Greece to as far north as Norway. Many, like my father and two of his siblings, were forced into slave labor, in the expectation that the ghastly conditions and starvation rations would kill them soon enough. But most of the Jews entering Auschwitz – like my father's parents and his youngest brother and sister – were murdered as soon as they arrived.
 Jewish families on the platform at Auschwitz-Birkenau for 'selection' after alighting from a train. The overwhelming majority would be immediately sent to the gas chambers. |
Auschwitz was an enormous factory of death. It is the place where more people were killed than any other in history. Even now, nearly three generations later, it is almost impossible to grasp the scale on which the Nazis committed homicide there. The number of Jews killed in Auschwitz between March 1942 and January 1945 was greater than the entire present-day population of Austin, Texas, or San Francisco. If, beginning today, you were to observe 1 consecutive minute of silence for each of those whose lives were destroyed, you would not speak again until the middle of December 2026. By 1944, Germany was transporting Jews to their deaths at such a furious rate that the train platform in Birkenau had become the busiest railway station in Europe. It held that distinction despite the fact that, unlike every other train station in the world, there were only arrivals. No passengers ever departed.
Auschwitz was not only a place of murder. It was also a place of theft on a gigantic scale.
Jews transported to Auschwitz were robbed of everything they owned – the luggage they carried, the clothes on their backs, the hair on their heads, even the gold in their teeth. The plundered goods were stored in 35 warehouses, where they were sorted, packed, and regularly shipped to Germany for the enrichment of the Third Reich. Before the Germans fled in January 1945, they burned to the ground 29 of the warehouses with all their contents. In the six that the Nazis didn't have time to destroy, the Allies found 350,000 men's suits, 837,000 women's outfits, a large quantity of children's and babies' clothing, and 44,000 pairs of shoes. There were also 17,000 pounds of human hair, 88 pounds of eyeglasses, 3,800 suitcases, 440 prosthetic limbs, and 12,000 pots, pans, and other kitchen utensils. In addition, there were seven trainloads of bedding waiting to be shipped.
And that was merely what remained at the very end — a minuscule percentage of all that had been looted from Europe's Jews.
Three days after the Red Army liberated Auschwitz, a Polish doctor, Tadeusz Chowaniec, entered the Nazi complex to help care for the survivors. In his diary of what he saw that day, Dr. Chowaniec described his first view of Block 11, one of the 28 barracks that comprised the oldest part of the camp:
"We walked down the cement stairs to the cellar," he wrote. "The stairs were slippery, and splattered with blood and mud. Strips of underclothing, soiled with excrement, lay everywhere. The corpses of men and women filled the corridor, which was almost 40 meters long. The corpses were naked, and their rib cages and hip bones jutted out. The skin, which was all that held the bones together, was thin, greenish, and pale. ... The dead lay in a bloody liquid. The people carrying out the corpses, clad in rubber boots, were up to their ankles in it. We looked on, stupefied."
Even after 80 years, Auschwitz, the largest mass-murder site on earth, still stupefies. Or it would, if not for the fact that more and more people know nothing about it. At least among those who have not forgotten to never forget, it remains a singular icon of evil, hatred, and cruelty, and the ultimate representation of what antisemitism can lead to.
What was the very worst thing about Auschwitz? Was it the staggering death toll? The gas chambers disguised as showers, in which thousands of naked, terrified Jews went daily to agonizing deaths? The systematic humiliation and dehumanization?
Was it the barbaric medical experiments carried out by doctors like Josef Mengele, such as the deliberate destruction of healthy organs, or the sadistic abuse of twins and dwarfs? The endless torture? The starvation? The horrific diseases that ravaged those the Nazis didn't kill first? Was it the willing exploitation of Jewish slave labor by German corporations? Or the tens of thousands of murdered children and babies?
No.
The very worst thing about Auschwitz is that, for all its evil immensity, it amounted to only a small fraction of Nazis' Final Solution. Even if Auschwitz had never been built, even if the butchery that occurred there had never happened, the Holocaust would still have been a crime without parallel. It would still have been a genocide unlike any other. Never before had a government made the murder of an entire people its central aim. And never before had a government turned human slaughter into a modern, sophisticated, international industry, complete with facilities for transportation, selection, murder, incineration — not as a means to an end but as an end in itself: The reason for wiping out the Jews was so that the Jews would be wiped out.
In the end, 6 million of them were killed. But only one-sixth died at Auschwitz.
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'They think they know'
During World War II, Charlotte Delbo was active in the French Resistance. A writer who worked for a theatrical company, she was in Argentina when the Wehrmacht invaded and occupied France in 1940. But she could not bear the thought of luxuriating in safety while others struggled against the Nazis, so she returned to occupied Paris and threw herself into the underground work of printing and distributing anti-German material. She was caught in 1942 and, early the following year, put on a transport for Auschwitz.
Delbo, who was not Jewish, survived the war and returned to Paris, where she lived for the next 40 years. Her best known work, "Auschwitz and After," is a moving memoir of her time in the death camp and an exploration of how she and her fellow survivors coped afterward with everything they had experienced. Much of the text consists of short vignettes, narrative fragments, or passages of poetry. Here she confronts the reader with the chilling irony of Auschwitz having been a mere "dot on the map," a "nameless place" that became the locus of so much suffering and terror:
This dot on the map
This black spot at the core of Europe
this red spot
this spot of fire this spot of soot
this spot of blood this spot of ashes
for millions
a nameless place.
Of the million and more innocent victims who were transported to Auschwitz from across Europe, virtually none had heard of this "dot on the map" when the doors of the boxcars were flung open and they were rapidly hustled out. They knew nothing about the "selection" they were about to face, in which some would be dispatched to slave labor and the rest to their deaths. Eight decades later, Auschwitz is no longer a nameless place. It has become the quintessential embodiment of human atrocity. But even now, can anyone "know" Auschwitz?
Today people know
have known for several years
that this dot on the map
is Auschwitz
This much they know
as for the rest
they think they know.
May the memory of my father's parents, brothers, and sisters, together with all who died in that place of evil, be an eternal blessing. And may the God of forgiveness, as Elie Wiesel once prayed, never forgive the murderers and their accomplices.
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What I Wrote Then
25 years ago on the op-ed page
From "If Elian returns to Cuba, misery awaits him," Jan. 13, 2000:
All other things being equal, children belong with their parents. But all other things have not been equal in Cuba since 1959. All other things can never be equal in a country that treats children — by law — as political raw material to be exploited by the state. In the civilized world, parents are entrusted with the freedom of shaping their children's values and guiding their education. But in Castro's Caribbean paradise, parents who try to raise their children according to the dictates of conscience have been punished with impoverishment, imprisonment — and worse.
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The Last Line
"Let us all hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear drenched communities, and in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty." — the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., "Letter from Birmingham Jail" (April 16, 1963)
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Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.
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