I am an irrepressible history nerd. That has driven my adult forays across Europe. Vacations are odysseys, not placid rests. I have been privileged to view amazing vistas, see astounding places, experience grand hikes, and interact with many interesting people.
My experiential trail includes a parade of museums, landmarks, and superlatives. Only one ever asked to be remembered. Days after my visit, its caretaker wrote to thank me for visiting. The writer reiterated:
Our mission is to get as many people as possible acquainted with the history of this place. If you would like to support our efforts . . ..
That is significant and singular. This place was depressing and draining. It touched me, and depleted me. Oddly, it later motivated and inspired me also. Its effect was similar to past experiences, but different. I struggle to describe how.
In 2019, I visited Munchen, a popular German city, famous for beer. I took a day then to visit Dachau, the first concentration camp of the National Socialists in Germany. That was a prison that evolved into an extermination site and is a place of significant suffering, cruelty, indifference, and death. Its impact on me was profound.
In 2021, in the midst of the Great Panic, I returned to Germany. There were no crowds, and society was more subdued. I found myself in Weimar, and visited Buchenwald. This was also a place of great evil, atrocity, and inhumanity. A camp zoo there was maintained there in the sight of prisoners. They were starved and dehumanized while animals were carefully tended feet away.
This network of National Socialist camps was employed for detaining, torturing, and murdering homosexuals, the Roma, captured soldiers, the Jewish people, the political dissent, and more. They were gathered, transported, dehumanized, and killed.
These two camps were difficult environs to visit. My days there were challenging to the spirit. The mindset of the camp's conspirators was alien, and the impressions were permanent. But neither of them thanked me for coming, nor sought my help.
But in 2024, after a five-hour drive from Wien, I stepped onto Auschwitz Birkenau. Here, evil not only dwelt, grew, and festered, but emanated and expanded. This was not the first of the camps (Dachau), but it was the worst (my opinion).
It lies remote in largely rural Poland. The town's name is Oświęcim, and it was invaded by the Germany of the late 1930s. Its name became the Germanic Auschwitz. Its rich local history became forever subordinated to the Socialist's evil.
The camp was deceptively condensed when one views Auschwitz in isolation. One wonders, how could so many be persecuted and executed in this space? A tour of the horrors requires about two hours. That includes a theater movie, live instruction by a docent, and information from a lanyard-borne electronic device.
I was surprised, plugging my headphones into the theater seat, to find the connection bore the name of a company that has been tied by some to the use of slave labor from this very camp system during that war. There are various businesses today that benefited from the cruelty and crime perpetrated on the various groups and individuals targeted by the National Socialists.
After Auschwitz itself, one is bussed to Birkenau. Its scale is unfathomable. Birkenau itself has to be 60 acres or more. The estimate is that the entire two-camp complex infects over 400 acres. Here, volumes of innocents disembarked trains, deluded and lied to, and most were exterminated within hours. The image of imprisonment here is overstated. Some were imprisoned and forced to labor, but vast numbers were exterminated within hours of arrival.
How many? No one will likely ever know. The killing was too random, too rapid, too egregious. Keeping accurate records was subordinate to efficiency.
There remains evidence. There remain memories. There remain testimonies. I walked for hours through the grounds. There are buildings still standing. There are foundations, scars, and remnants. There is a feeling of dread and depression associated with the premises. One wonders if that results from our knowledge of what occurred there? Is the place evil in its own right, or do we feel it because of our foundational knowledge?
I have been privileged to meet two who survived this place. I have struggled to appreciate their pain and loss. I have realized I can never grasp their loss, experience, or despair. How might anyone who did not live it do so? I am fortunate nonetheless. Many will never meet such a survivor. And with each passing day, the population of survivors is diminished. In my lifetime, it is nearly certain that population will become zero.
That is why they asked me to remember. It is left to those who study history to remember. Even as the eyewitnesses age and pass, someone must preserve the Socialist history, and remember the atrocities that it committed.
I rounded out my 2024 foray with a stop in Amsterdam. I toured the hiding place of the most famous of holocaust victims, Anne Frank. I looked, wondered, and contemplated. I saw little with which to identify when I read her diary decades ago. It has taken me years of life and miles of travel to appreciate the plight of her family.
Her persecution in Germany, flight to the Netherlands, isolation, fear, and feelings are well documented. Her life and death, however, are more real to me having toured these sites. She was betrayed, captured, and transported from Amsterdam. She stopped briefly in Auschwitz and moved on to yet another of the vast camp system. She died a child in a system that cared nothing for her humanity, dignity, or promise.
I reflected on the message from Auschwitz. It asked no reparation of me. It asked for no sacrifice. It asked simply for remembrance. It is cared for, curated, and preserved. It is a testament to the works of evil and the peril of forgotten humanity. It asks little, simply to be remembered. Not for its sake, but for the sake of the millions who were slaughtered throughout the Socialist camp system.
Perhaps, in some manner, this short piece does that.
