My time in Cracow was well spent. I visited the most terrifying place on earth – Auschwitz and Birkenau – and managed to escape with more than a life. Don’t get me wrong! I do not seek a comparison between this Death Camp or the others of Hitler’s creation. Auschwitz and Birkenau are clearly recognizable as a centre for Destruction of The Jews that was so managed, its industrialized slaughter of innocence percolates all history. For that reason, in my life I came away with a deeper sadness for what has made History more dark than had ever been previously conceived of. I emerged too with a readiness to continue my work and add to that Remembrance which Tokele has delivered for me.
I have a willingness to bear the vicissitudes of those deniers who troll my effort. With an exactness befitting those Nazis willingly pursuing the Jews to their Deaths, the vitriol of the denial fraud will not dent my resolve. I suppose it is a deep seated need to confront those who would bully others into believing their alternative history, a revised history of lies, obfuscating the truth to promote an agenda riddled with hatred. But the World is a more savvy place, filled with enquiring minds whose integrity will see beyond the attempt to deceive them. The Holocaust is not open for Discussion.
Whatever one chooses to believe of the content of the Destruction of 6,000,000 Jews of Europe, be it the exact nature of the Catastrophe, the figures of the account, the statistical analysis, we know with a categoric certainty that Hitler selected these Jewish People for annihilation. As I journeyed from Cracow toward the site of such ignominy, I looked out onto a Countryside that has not much changed in appearance, though in structure, it is without doubt an inhabited wasteland. It is devoid of its Jewish Citizens, of which 3,000,000 were mere grist to a Nazi killing machine.
The land here, the Countryside adorned with fields of growth and sustenance is a constant reminder that while the land continues in perpetuity, the life blood of its people is stained by the calamity that struck out at it during The Holocaust period. Any visit, and for whatever reason that journey is made, must be considered from its historic perspective. Auschwitz is unlike any Museum one is likely (or possible) to meet. It has a cultural basis in what was taken from existence, and over 1,100,000 Jews were divested of their very existence here. The culture of denigration resided here! The culture of brutality was visited here! The culture of Jewish pre-eminence was wasted here! The culture of Medical propriety was divorced here! The destruction of the Jewish People was augmented here within a culture of bestiality and belligerence! That culture, took from Life and delivered a term of Genocide which adds to all cultures which subtracts from the lives of People.
What is left of Culture once one has visited such a place? Can one look at Titian with the same eyes? Can one listen to Beethoven or Mozart and not hear the plaintive cries of a vanished People? Can Culture ever present itself as other than a tarnished receptacle of what evil can truly accomplish! We look for light in the dark and recognise the pervasiveness of all that shades our existence. We see a dwindling light evade our attempts to cast out the shadows but recognize as light pierces the darkness of The Holocaust, all cultural significance has to be weighted against what we choose to have enlighten us!
Can the World recognize in Art, that the discarded bodies of those Jews, left to rot in Ghettos, piled high in Death Camps are the haunting gain of enlightenment gone wrong? Will we ever look to the Cherubs and not see the images of small infant children discarded by callous brutality, wandering though depths of despair we cannot begin to contemplate? There is a newer pertinence when all but a few do not shudder at the prospect of what was allowed to happen to well over 1,000,000 Jewish Children in The Holocaust. The searing temperature of the brutality, the desolation and despair which greeted The Jews of Europe repaints the tableau of what had Civilized us.
There is the constant search today for the tools to comprehend all that happened to these Jewish People, and for Me, it is terribly damning that we can speak of such Destruction of People, and the Children. Can we simply ignore what was allowed to happen here? Look at all the physical evidence. The photographs! The Film reels! Then added to the Evidence and Testimony of those who Survived, can we lessen the trauma in any way? No! We can never repay the debt owed to the 6,000,000 Jews of Europe but we must try.
