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How can those who saw live with the memory?
By Carl Heintze
Sometimes--I suppose because I'm of German ancestry--I wonder if there still survives a guard who worked at Auschwitz. And if they are is still alive, I wonder how they have managed to live with themselves.
If such a person is still alive, he or she must be in their mid or late 70s, a long time to have lived with one's conscience and with the memories of probably the worst of the Nazi death camps of the Holocaust.
How, I wonder, is it possible to live this long with the knowledge that one contributed to the deaths of thousands of innocent lives?
You will remember, if you are old enough, and if you're not, I will remind you that Auschwitz was a camp in Poland where trainloads of Jews from all over Europe were taken for what the Germans called the Final Solution.
The Nazi regime had first tried shooting Jews to eliminate them. But this took too long and was too expensive. So at Auschwitz and also at Treblinka and other death camps, they took another tack.
Once the captives descended from the cattle cars in which they rode (and sometimes died), they were marched to a point where men and women, children and mothers, the old, the sick and lame were separated. Those who seemed relatively healthy were sent in one direction to work until they dropped dead from inadequate diet and exhaustion. The rest were marched into what looked like showers, stripped of their clothes and then gassed to death by the thousands.
It is inconceivable that any guards who worked in the camp were unaware of what was happening. It seems, however, not to have bothered them much until the camp was closed and the war ended.
Perhaps this was because by gassing their victims, instead of shooting them, and then using "healthy" Jews to move the bodies from the gas chambers to crematoria, the guards shielded themselves from the more distasteful aspects of killing people.
The guards, of course, were efficient. They or their captives salvaged teeth fillings, hair, clothing and anything not human from this process, presumably for use by the living.
What happened to the guards who survived the war?
Auschwitz eventually was overrun by the advancing Russian armies and many were killed. Others fled. Some were tried after the war and executed. But did any suffer an even worse fate, to have to live for another 50 or more years with the memory of what had happened there burned into their souls?
A handful of Jews still remember Aushwitz. A handful of Germans must, too. But so far as I know, they remain silent. None has published his or her memoirs. I think of these questions now and then because the Holocaust was not the end of the inhumanity of men (and women).
Remember Cambodia, where those who killed and those who were killed were not people of differing ethnic groups but of the same nation? Or Rwanda, where one only had to be a member of the wrong tribe to be marked for death? Or even Israel, where Palestinians and Jews remain locked in ethnic, religious, social and territorial conflict.
Time does not limit inhumanity.
What is worse, like a tide, the effects of man attacking himself spread on and on through time. Revenge (or as some call it, justice and redemption) often seem an inescapable part of social, ethnic and national conflict.
Those who have been hurt want those who have hurt them to share the pain and suffering. Justice is seldom tempered.
Even though we live in a land without (so far) a Holocaust, we fought a bitter civil war over whether slavery was justifiable. Segregation, lynchings and the demeaning of those with skins of a different color have not long been gone from our past. The tide from Gettysburg, Shiloh and the Battle of Atlanta continues to sweep into our history.
The world is imperfect. We are the imperfect creatures who dominate it. But must we also be doomed to be the inhuman creatures who try to kill one another?
It is a question we need to ask ourselves, no matter where we come from or what we intend to do with the rest of our lives--or whether we seek justice, redemption and punishment.
Carl Heintze is a frequent contributor to The Sun. A collection of his essays may be found at http://www.doitright.com/Carl/essays.
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Sunnyvale, California Since 1994
