"Arbeit Macht Frei"

By Jeffrey Berger

These days the sunlight almost seems total.  A few men and women, trees,

stand between heaven and earth.  In the light of their shadows

we others are reading, still, messages the dead have stopped sending,

these days of almost fatal sunlight.  (Henry Braun, The Vergil Woods)

Seventy years have passed since the liberation of Auschwitz.  This post remembers a maternal great-grandfather who perished in the Holocaust.  It honors missing persons of a family tree whose fates will never be known. It commemorates innocent victims of persecution whose life possibilities were cut mercilessly short.

The exact death toll at Auschwitz remains elusive. Many inmates were undocumented, and large amounts of incriminating evidence were destroyed in the final weeks of war. The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum sets the official record:

1.1 million - total victims

960,000 - Jewish victims

438,000 - Hungarian Jews

300,000 - Polish Jews

69,000 - French Jews

60,000 - Dutch Jews

55,000 - Greek Jews

75,000 - non-Jewish Poles

21,000 - Romani

15,000 - Soviet POWs

15,000 - disabled and other

The Red Army liberated Auschwitz on January 27, 1945. Only 7,500 emaciated prisons were found alive among 600 corpses, 370,000 men's suits, 837,000 women's garments, and 8.5 tons of human hair.  Among the survivors who recovered and resumed full and productive lives:

Elie Wiesel (awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986), Simone Veil (served as President of the European Parliament), Rudolf Vrba and Alfréd Wetzler (escapees who saved an estimated 120,000 to 200,000 inmates), Thomas Buergenthal (judge of the International Court of Justice), Imre Kertesz (writer and Nobel Laureate in Literature for 2002), Joel Lebowitz (mathematician and physicist who won the prestigious Max Planck award), Vladek and Anja Spiegelman (parents of American cartoonist Art Spiegelman), and Jack Tramiel (founder of Commodore International) ...

Little is known of my great-grandfather.  He was an author, a philosopher and college professor living in Prague when the Nazi army occupied Czechoslovakia.  No letters or literary works survive apart from anecdotal accounts handed down by word of mouth – until the trial of Adolph Eichmann in 1961 revealed his fate.

According to trial testimony, Eichmann ordered the SS to stop a deportation train headed for Auschwitz.  Aboard that ill-fated train was a 'nettlesome agitator' for human rights. Eichmann ordered his execution by firing squad. This man was my great-grandfather. 

Everyday in 1961, my mother and grandmother watched the Eichmann trial on TV.  I recall their stunned silence when the name of my great-grandfather — and his final fate — was revealed during trial testimony. A family chapter was finally closed.

Are some people more predisposed to obedience than others - willing to follow even the most heinous orders?  Yale University research psychologist Stanley Milgram tested this hypothesis, with disturbing results:

The percentage of test subjects willing to inflict pain on command was constant across all population groups – ranging from 61 to 66 percent regardless of ethnicity, gender, nationality, or circumstance.

Milgram’s experiment reveals a grim truth about human nature: Everywhere in the world are people innately capable of unspeakable savagery.  Genocide did not end with World War II.  It happened again in Tibet (1959-1966), in Cambodia (1975-1979), in Bosnia-Herzegovina (1992-1995), and in Rwanda (1994).  Even today, atrocities continue unabated in Darfur, Iraq, and Syria.  The record of human history is long and grim:

Wars of aggression and oppression; true believers versus infidels, Christians against Christians, Muslims against Muslims; vainglorious empires, colonialism, greed; whites enslave blacks; Nazis murder Jews, Hutus slaughter Tutsis; inquisitions, persecutions, pogroms, endless cycles of retribution and revenge and unrelenting violence … since the beginning of time.

Yet, there are deniers and revisionists who still dispute the indisputable, and madmen who target innocent civilians. Is one massacre worse than another? Does the tragic history of one people invalidate the tormented history of another?  Either no account is valid, or every account is valid and deserving of remembrance.

Consider the diversity of life that has evolved on Earth over eons of time.  Here is a single species united in time but divided in language, culture, customs and tribe.  ‘Ecce homo.’  Behold the lot of humankind constantly at war, each committing acts of violence upon another.

‘Arbeit macht frei.’  Perversely cynical words intended to exterminate, not liberate. Words more aptly inscribed above the Gates of Hell: 'Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.'

How will humanity ever find peace?  Shall we segregate people by geography, by race, religion, and custom?  Shall we end all commerce and cultural exchange?  Shall we prevent the free migrations of people and the free exchange of human invention?  Or …

Shall we learn how to integrate and tolerate – even appreciate – the diversity and rich cultural heritage of all humankind?

There will be no peace, no hope, no freedom from tyranny and war until people come to terms with their darkest impulses.

© February 1, 2015