[Peace-discuss] Auschwitz spun

[David Green]

Struggle to mark horror of Auschwitz
Leaders, survivors to pay tribute

By Tom Hundley
Tribune foreign correspondent
Published January 27, 2005

OSWIECIM, Poland -- On Jan. 27, 1945, Soviet soldiers
from the 1st Ukrainian Front liberated the Nazi death
camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Sixty years later, leaders
from more than 40 nations will gather Thursday beside
the snow-covered ruins of the camp's Crematorium No. 2
to mark the occasion.

Tribute will be paid to the victims and survivors.
There will be speeches and somber music as comfortable
societies attempt to grasp some meaning in the
systematic murder of 1.1 million people, to find
something ennobling in the agonies of this place.

But in the end, there is nothing ennobling about
Auschwitz.

"There are two options," said Michael Schudrich, an
American who is chief rabbi of Poland.

"We can say Auschwitz is so horrible, it should just
be buried and forgotten; so horrible, there is no
purpose in gathering together," he said. "Or we can
ask ourselves: What would those murdered at Auschwitz
want? What is the way that we can most effectively
pass their message on to the next generation?"

To refer to this anniversary as the "liberation" of
Auschwitz is a bit of a misnomer. For most of the
60,000 inmates of the camp, the approach of the Soviet
army a week earlier meant the beginning of a long
"death march" to concentration camps inside Germany.

For Marian Turski, an 18-year-old Jew from Lodz who
was active in the underground resistance, it would be
worse than anything he experienced in Auschwitz.

"In my case, we walked two days and one night to a
rail junction at Wodzislaw," he said. Stragglers were
shot; others were felled by the fierce Polish winter.

"At Wodzislaw we were loaded into cattle cars, 120 in
each car, for the second part of our journey. To
Buchenwald," said Turski, a historian who now lives in
Warsaw.

Although the distance to Buchenwald was only 250
miles, the journey took three days. The prisoners were
given no food or water.

"When we got to Buchenwald, there were 36 dead bodies
in my car--36 out of 120," he said.

A few days later, when the first Soviet troops entered
the gates of Auschwitz-Birkenau, they found about
7,000 prisoners who were left behind.

Although the Soviets were welcomed as liberators, it
was only a matter of weeks before they began
plundering and raping those they liberated. Women who
survived the Nazis were raped to death by Soviet
soldiers, according to survivor testimonies.

Ten thousand Soviet war prisoners were sent to
Auschwitz in 1941, and a grim fate awaited the
survivors among them. Stalin decreed that there were
no Soviet "prisoners," only "betrayers of the
motherland." Thus classified, they were rounded up and
sent to languish in Siberia.

Many in Eastern Europe saw the Soviets "not as
liberators but as aggressors--it was a second
occupation," said Piotr Setkiewicz, director of the
archives at the Auschwitz-Birkenau state museum.

Little notice at first

At the time, the liberation of Auschwitz drew little
notice in the Western press. Even Pravda, the Soviet
newspaper, did not pick up the story until nearly a
week later.

Soon after the Pravda story, a Soviet film crew
arrived at Auschwitz. They restaged the liberation
using real soldiers and real inmates, according to
Setkiewicz. The soldiers wore clean uniforms, and the
inmates greeted them with bouquets.

Not until several months later, in April 1945, when
advancing American and British troops liberated the
camps at Dachau, Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen did the
West began to comprehend the enormity of the Nazis'
crime against the Jews.

The Russians had a different interpretation.

"One of the least appealing aspects of the Soviet
analysis of Auschwitz, now and later, was the
downplaying of the scale of suffering endured by the
Jews in the camp; the emphasis was on referring to
everyone who died as collectively `victims of
fascism,'" Laurence Rees wrote in a new history.

As Jewish survivors attempted to make their way back
to homes in Poland, Slovakia and elsewhere in Eastern
Europe, they discovered how much things had changed.
Strangers were living in their houses. Strangers had
taken over their shops. In cities and towns where they
had coexisted separately but peacefully with
Christians for years, they now found open hostility.

Many decided to start new lives in North America or
Israel. Turski, who survived a second death march from
Buchenwald to Terezin was a committed socialist
determined to stay in Poland.

"I was offered a chance to study in the United States
or Canada, but I chose a more difficult path," he
said. "I wanted to build a new society, to rebuild the
country."

Some of the most prominent Nazi leaders were tried for
war crimes. Rudolf Hoess, the first commandant of
Auschwitz, was captured and sent back to the camp as a
prisoner. He was hanged next to Crematorium No. 1 on
April 16, 1947.

But very few of the estimated 6,500 members of the SS
who ran Auschwitz-Birkenau with such sickening
efficiency were ever brought to justice. According to
historian Rees, only about 750 SS members received
punishment of any kind.

The survivors were tormented by demons. Even some of
those who seemed to have built normal, happy lives for
themselves in adopted homelands found, in their old
age, that repressed traumas bubbled to the surface and
claimed their sanity.

At the end of the 20th Century, a final indignity was
heaped upon the victims when it came to light that
banks in Switzerland and elsewhere profited hugely by
hiding the victims' deposits from their rightful
heirs.

As the representative of the nation credited with
liberating Auschwitz, Russian President Vladimir Putin
is one of three heads of state who will give a speech
at Thursday's ceremony. Given the increasingly
anti-democratic tendencies of his regime, the choice
makes many uncomfortable.

The two other speakers are Israeli President Moshe
Katsav and Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski.
Vice President Dick Cheney will represent the U.S.

Pope sends representative

Pope John Paul II, whose boyhood home is near
Auschwitz and who worked briefly as a slave laborer
under the Nazis, has dispatched Cardinal Jean-Marie
Lustiger, the archbishop of Paris, as his
representative.

The choice of Lustiger, a former Jew whose mother died
at Auschwitz, has been criticized by some Jewish
leaders who say that while Lustiger is widely
respected, conversion to Catholicism is hardly the
message that most Jews would draw from Auschwitz.

Despite the conflicting interpretations and lingering
injustices, despite all the inadequacies in attempting
to commemorate Auschwitz, it must be done.

"Auschwitz is a symbol of the Holocaust. It is a place
of national tragedy. It is a place of individual
sorrow. How do you create the space for all of those
feelings and emotions?" asked Schudrich, the rabbi.

"There is no answer," he said. "But I think we must
continue to struggle to find meaningful and honest
ways to remember what happened there," he said.


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