The Red Army was descending from Russia
and, on 27th January 1945, arrived at the Auschwitz-Birkenau
extermination camp. It was built by the Nazis, very close to Kraków in their polish territory and was the most efficient place for the
mass extermination of those individuals, who racist criminals deemed should not
survive. One and a half million innocent people are estimated to have been
murdered in that haunting place.
Without a
doubt, it is the name Auschwitz-Birkenau that evokes the
most horrendously, awful scenes where killing machines were used the most
consistently, not forgetting other extermination sites no less horrendous. The
most significant amongst them were divided into twelves camps where, in some
places, the numbers of victims were not too far behind Auschwitz-Birkenau. I
had the solemn privilege of visiting most of these camps, particularly those
most effective in their daily mission: to concentrate, kill and burn their
victims. Treblinka was one of the most famous and effective sites of all.
It annihilated more human beings in less time than any other camp, including
Auschwitz-Birkenau. Treblinka opened in July 1942 and closed in October 1943.
It was open for one year and three months. More than 850,000 people were
annihilated during this period.
Sobibor extermination camp was created
in March 1942. Unlike others, Sobibor was where the Nazis concentrated the
greatest number of soviet Jews coming from the eastern front as prisoners of
war and also gypsies. 200,000 people were assassinated in that horrific place. When
the gas chambers were introduced, it was not the effects of the pesticide Zyklon
B that killed them but the effects of a 200 horse-power petrol engine that was placed in a nearby
shed and ran through a tube directly into the chamber where those defenceless,
naked victims were waiting to die. The graves were nearby. Each grave was
between 50 and 60 metres long and 10 to 15 metres wide. They varied between
five and seven meters deep.
Hell exists: Auschwitz-Birkenau
Twelve years have passed, yet those
terrible images remain etched in my memory, from when I embarked upon my
week-long trip to Poland to visit the main concentration and extermination
camps where they stole the lives of five million victims – yes, five million. We
must repeat this figure in order for us to take responsibility for the sheer
magnitude of this tragedy: the murder of innocent Jews, along with whom, five
hundred thousand gypsies were also victims of hate and racial blindness. The perpetrators
of these crimes were thugs without a conscience, for whom the concept of
compassion and mercy were unknown.
Rudolf Höss, the Auschwitz-assassin
Rudolf Höss was the first director of the
extermination camp and the most notorious of the Nazi regime. He was named
commander of the new camp on 30th April 1940 and remained at its
forefront until the end of 1943. Höss was a machine prepared to kill. He
launched the initiative to expand Auschwitz by constructing Birkenau
which dramatically increased the number of daily assassinations to reach such
horrific numbers.
Rudof Höss was particularly
cruel to the gypsies both in his role as founding director of Auschwitz and when
he returned to the camp to launch new extermination processes. This monster was
an enthusiastic fan of Josef Mengele, the doctor who was named medical
director of Zigeunerfamilienlager (the camp for gypsy families) in the
Birkenau complex.
The friendship between Megle and Höss facilitated
multiple experiments to be conducted on adult gypsies. For example, they were
left with infectious diseases until they spread amongst the gypsy prisoners as
they lived in crammed, tiny spaces. The Nuremberg trials proved that the Nazis
allowed typhus to spread amongst the gypsies in order to measure its resistance.
They injected bacteria from tuberculosis with the sole aim of experimenting in
the search for vaccinations.
However, the pure evilness of Auschwitz’s
doctor-come-assassin was unpresented in what was considered the first mass
slaughter of children. It was in Buchenwald. 250 gypsy children from Czechoslovakia
were assassinated during the trials of Zyclon B (the chemical agent used in the
gas chambers). They supplied cyanide in crystal form to see how long it took
them to die.
Then we arrived at the doors of hell
I do confess that my visit to the camps
impacted me in a way that was challenging to overcome. Above all, apart from
having a common purpose: racist extermination of all those who did not belong
to the Arian race, the wide variety of killing methods used rendered it difficult
to categorise. To me, it seems that to end a life by firing-squad would be more
humane than injecting diseases, leaving people to starve to death or dying from
exhaustion after countless days of forced labour.
Slowly but
surely, I mentally prepared myself to face my final test: the Auschwitz visit. Walking
through the sinister barracks was like being in a horror film. Seeing mountains
of glasses abandoned by the prisoners, thousands of shoes in all varieties and
sizes, small suitcases with shaving paraphernalia and hairbrushes of all sorts
made me cry. Only then did I understand why our guide (who had accompanied us
through the entire trip) had decided not to join us. He was a Jew and had been
injured in a war while previously serving his country in the army. Now, as a
member of Yad Vashem (The World Holocaust Memorial Centre), he dedicated
his time to portraying what had occurred during theHolocaust. Of course,
at that moment I understood why he could not venture into the space where
millions of his fellow citizens had suffered indescribable torture then lost
their lives!
And then the moment arrived to go into
the gas chambers
When I reached the entrance to the gas
chambers, I needed a moment to gather my strength. I knew that I was about to
enter a place where years ago, thousands of gypsies, both men and women, girls
and boys, accompanied millions of Jews, disabled people and people with various
sexual orientations had lost their lives. I must confess, I was nervous. I
thought perhaps it would have been better for me to stay at the entrance with
the guide, but now there was no going back.
A young Jewish-polish guide accompanied
us into that sinister place. She told us that the victims would have been calm while
on their way to death. They had been purposely misled. They had been told that
they were about to take a shower to avoid whatever types of infection or
illnesses and that later, they would return to their dormitories. The poor
things! First, we passed a small enclosure where they had to deposit anything valuable,
they had about their person including rings, chains, necklaces or watches.
Next, we went through another room where the innocents had to remove all their
clothes and put them on a shelf where later they would reclaim their
possessions, or so they were told. Finally, we crossed the threshold into the
gas chamber. It was a large room, obviously without windows and could accommodate
many individuals.
Once the door was closed, the “final
solution” commenced
Using a system similar to a shower, from
the outside they introduced cyanide or carbon monoxide as well as Zyklon B,
a chemical which released large quantities of cyanidic acid, a gas heavier than
air. A specialised website describes this final point, “All of the victims were
dead within 25 minutes. The gas acts by inhibiting victims’ respiratory
cellular metabolic cycles which meant that they perished by suffocation while
continuing to endure spasms and convulsions”.
From outside, the executioners stood and
watched from behind a thick window in the door. They watched while the innocent
victims died. When they had all died, they opened the door to ventilate and
took the corpses to the crematorium.
Today on 27th January, 75 years after the Allies put an end to this terrible nightmare, I fear that some political parties, in this tumultuous period of European history, have not learnt the lesson.
This English translation has been possible thanks to the PerMondo project: Free translation of website and documents for non-profit organisations. A project managed by Mondo Agit. Translator: Scarlett Newton.
