Teaching Our Kids | Oct. 9, 2006 Full series is here: http://www.planetwaves.net/contents/auschwitz_photo_series.html THE GUY in the photo above is called Leonard. He is a minister who brings groups of kids to Auschwitz a few times a year from Norway and Sweden. There were a lot of students there the day I went, and I trust that this is pretty much true most days. For some reason, most of the students I met at Auschwitz and in Krakow were from the progressive democratic countries in northern Europe, who have made the connection between dignity, freedom and keeping the world safe from another disaster like this. Here, in a very straightforward way, he is explaining to these students that they are in front of the ruins of gas chamber/crematorium 2, and what that means. This is at Auschwitz ii - Birkenau, the extended camp, the extermination complex. About 50 teenagers are listening attentively as he speaks. Beside us is another group going on in French. I understand enough French to know that the teacher is putting it to the students a little at a time, very tactfully, but getting the basic facts across. Here, day after day, crowds of 1,000 or more people, most of them newly arrived by train, would go downstairs to undressing rooms, remove their clothes, and go upstairs to the "showers." They had been instructed to fold their clothes neatly and remember exactly where they left them, so they'd be able to find them when they came back. Then, together with their families and the people they had traveled with, they would be gassed to death. The chamber would be left sealed for about half an hour to make sure nobody was missed (which didn't always work). Bodies, alive or dead, were then taken in carts on little tracks to the crematoria and incinerated in ovens up to three at a time. The ashes would be dumped in pits that are still there, where you can still find bits of bone in the nearby topsoil -- direct evidence of what happened. The reason the buildings are in ruins is because the elite Nazi SS men, who ran the camp system, dynamited them just before the camp was liberated, in order to hide the evidence of their crimes against humanity. That kind of gesture is seen more of an admission of knowing it was wrong. From 70% to 75% of the new arrivals at Auschwitz ii - Birkenau were killed immediately. The rest, the strongest among them, were allowed to live for about a month, and do their part in the German war effort, whether it was forced labor or taking part in "scientific" experimentation. We need to pause and remember that these survivors lived out their short lives knowing that the rest of their families, with whom they arrived, had gone to the ovens. Toward the end of the war, there was a rubber factory called Auschwitz iii - Monowitz that used prisoners in an industrial setting; a concentration camp combined with a factory. This served for the Buna-Werke factory of the IG Farben concern*. There were many of these. We need to add slave labor to the list of Nazi atrocities. Leonard explained about a place at the camp called Canada, which was where everyone's baggage was sent, and there, sorted through for valuables (most of which were put into to the war effort). Many of the suitcases had some food in them. So the camp inmates who worked at Canada were the well-fed ones, as opposed to those who survived their remaining month of life on bread, margarine, and broth made from rotten vegetables. Apparently, those in Auschwitz considered the nation of Canada to be their idea of the safest haven in the world. So the part of the camp where you would actually get to eat and do reasonable work was named for their utopia. I didn't see this place, or the museum that was made from its contents: a lot of belongings of a lot of people. People disappearing by the thousands from the streets of Paris, vanishing from Amsterdam, being vacuumed off the roads and countrysides of Romania and the Baltic states, kids being collected from hospitals and put on trains, families being shipped in from Warsaw, and so on. There are mountains of prosthetic limbs, hair (of women, shaved off prior to gassing) which was sold into the war effort, recycled into some product), family photos, clothing... When I visited Buchenwald some years ago, they had a display, in a glass case about 18 inches wide and 20 meters long, of coat buttons. You would walk by this thing and see an endless variety and endless quantity of coat buttons going by, and you would get the point quickly. We could be extremely polite and call it human harvesting. It is kind of how we treat most animals, particularly food animals -- if you want a graphic comparison. They actually had people sleeping on straw. Not straw mats, straw, like sheep and pigs, thrown on the floor. But there is another word for it, which is genocide. The question that nobody has answered to satisfaction is "how does this happen?" But that should not keep us from asking, because it happens often enough; in some odd way it seems endemic to the human condition that, fairly soon, somewhere in the world, somebody is going to start a genocide. We know enough about what happened to be able to break it down to details, events and developments; we know enough about the politics and the social psychology to recognize it, and see it in action. The reasoning processes are easy to spot. One of them is, "These people are not human so we're doing everyone a big favor by killing them." Then add, "If you don't support us, you could be next." There just seems to be a fairly wide-scale refusal, as there was in Europe during the war, to admit what is happening when it's happening. Could we really torture and bomb Muslims if we also admitted their humanity? Could it be glorified on TV, if we revealed their real agony and loss, and actually felt it? Or do we let ourselves get away with it by figuring well, these are bad people. As I proposed earlier, the real problem with the Nazis was that they were liars. Everything else that followed came from that one quality. You could not do something like this in an atmosphere of truth, which is why it's important to tell the truth. This is a tall order in politics, I know. Because truth is somewhat difficult to establish, and often subject to debate, it is sometimes difficult to identify lies and liars. But it's also very easy to lie. Yet it would help a lot if people did not find it so comforting to be lied to -- which is a big part of why it's so easy. We must develop a distaste for this, and connect with the appropriate rage that would be a healthy response to deception. And we need to teach our kids. I was taught to be aware of this subject by Ira Zornberg, my social studies teacher at John Dewey High School, who was also the first person who recruited me to be a writer on a serious journal. The Holocaust Education Center at Dewey had the role of being the place within the New York City school system where elementary school kids would come and see films and hear discussions of what happened during the Second World War in the 1930s and early 1940s. The discussions were led by other students, mainly Mr. Zornberg's specially trained social studies students. This is a tradition we have to keep alive. It was really good to meet Leonard. The guy felt like a brother. And I had some excellent discussions with his students as we walked around the memorial at the back of the camp, between crematoria 2 and 3. Some of them wanted to know what I was doing there, and I said, well, I went to this really progressive high school and just like you, we were made aware of the truth, and it stuck. -- Today is the anniversary of the death of Oskar Schindler. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oskar_Schindler -- *I just looked up IG Farben in Wiki - link provided below, one of the most disturbing Wiki entries I've seen. Farben was the principal Nazi corporation that had a near monopoly on chemical production in Germany during the war, and which owned the patent on Zyklon B gas. The Nazis were part and parcel of IG Farben, to the point where chemical factories in conquered territory were turned over to the company, which in turn did work for the war effort, for profit. (This is why fascism is also called corporatism.) After the war, the company was broken up; three of the units survive today. One of the units became BASF, which makes recording tape and many other products. BASF appears in the history of dioxin, as one of the worst offenders (there is something called the Badische incident, infamous in dioxin history, where people were contaminated). Agfa we've all heard of -- you can buy their film in drug stores today. Bayer sells their products in every 7-Eleven and supermarket in the world. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IG_Farben http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASF