THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, January 27, 1995 TAG: 9501270007
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A12 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Medium: 70 lines
News of the Red Army's seizure of Auschwitz, a half-century ago yesterday, was largely lost amid accounts of spectacular advances by Allied forces against the Germans in Europe and the Japanese in the Pacific. But Auschwitz quickly burned itself into the world's conscience with publication of photographs and eyewitness descriptions of skeletal inmates, living and dead, found at this most infamous of Nazi death camps, in Poland.
The Russians found about 7,000 emaciated inmates whom the Nazis had left behind while herding thousands of others eastward on marches that most did not survive.
There have been countless hells on Earth. And new hells are spawned daily in places famous and obscure. But Auschwitz was singularly hellish in the breadth, depth and single-mindedness of its evil.
At Auschwitz, modern technology, transportation and communication networks and bureaucratic organization were employed by a lawless, apparently invincible regime inspired by toxic racist and political ideologies to murder men, women and children in unprecedented numbers.
Auschwitz is the enduring symbol of the Holocaust, the Nazis' barbaric crusade against Jews, which began in 1933. A precise count of how many Jews and non-Jews were slaughtered there - by gassing, starvation, shooting, torture, overwork, disease, exposure - is impossible. The Germans eliminated many records and witnesses of their atrocities as their enemies closed in. They killed 6 million Jews in their pursuit of the Final Solution ``to the Jewish problem.'' Of the 1.1 million to 1.5 million people who perished at Auschwitz, some 90 percent were Jews.
Killing Jews because they were Jews was Auschwitz's main mission from 1941 until the Russians overran it. The death camp was really three camps: Auschwitz One, Auschwitz Two (known as Birkenau), which contained the gas chambers and crematoria, and Auschwitz Three, a slave-labor camp containing I.G. Farben and Buna-Werke factories producing synthetic rubber.
The Auschwitz complex was one of six killing centers in Poland, where most of the Holocaust's victims were murdered. The other killing centers were Kulmhoff, Belzec, Sobibor, Lublin and Treblinka. In some camps, the dead numbered in the tens of thousands; in the rest, in the hundreds of thousands.
Fifty million is the generally accepted estimate of lives claimed by World War II. The statistic includes the Holocaust dead, slaughtered in the most terrible pogrom in the long history of anti-Semitism that is an ineradicable bloodstain upon Christendom. Had the Nazi regime not been defeated by superior armed force, the toll of Jewish dead would have been even higher, as would have been the toll among other groups marked for persecution and butchering by the Third Reich: Gypsies, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, communists. . . .
Every century amasses horrors. But there is no bloodier century than the 20th. No previous century possessed weapons and machines capable of killing and maiming so many so quickly. The 20th century's butchered are reckoned in the tens of millions. The body count still rises as we slide toward the millennium.
In the years since World War II, Holocaust survivors and their kinsmen pledged that never again would Jews be helpless before their enemies. The state of Israel and the aid it receives from Jews worldwide and the ceaseless efforts to counter anti-Semitism in every form are products of that resolve. So, too, are the quest for brotherhood between Christians and Jews and the commitment of millions to the cause of dispelling hatred and bigotry among all humankind.
The struggle is uphill. The legions of darkness never rest. But memories of the Holocaust horrors spur the cause. They remind us how unspeakably terrible the cost can be when evil rides high. by CNB