Auschwitz Must Be Preserved

An Address at Auschwitz- June 24, 2003

There is an ancient Talmudic story about a heathen who came to two rabbis.

First he came to Shammai, a harsh and disciplined scholar and said:

“Tell me the whole Torah while I stand on one leg.”

Shamai showed him the door and dismissed him from his presence.

He then turned to Hillel, the compassionate and saintly head of another school of thought and asked him the identical question. Hillel thought carefully for a moment and responded:

“What is distasteful to you, do not do to your neighbor.” “The rest is commentary,” he added. “Go study it.”

Auschwitz must be preserved.

Why?

“Because Auschwitz is Auschwitz.”

The rest is commentary, important commentary but commentary nonetheless.

Permit me to elaborate. Allow me to say some things that many of you know so well, that many of you experienced in your bodies as you endured incarceration and as your families and communities were annihilated.

Let me first speak as a scholar and then as a pilgrim.

I need not tell you what Auschwitz was, but together we must tell the world again and again.

Auschwitz was the most lethal and the most complex of the six Nazi death camps established in German-occupied Poland. Actually, three camps in one: it was a prison camp (Auschwitz I), a death camp (Birkenau Auschwitz II) and a slave-labor camp (Auschwitz III- Buna-Monowitz and the surrounding camps). The three camps were interrelated; Birkenau and Buna-Monowitz worked together to bring slavery to its ultimate perfection. It was at these complexes that between 1.1 and 1.3 million people were murdered – nine out of ten of them Jews -- and during its most intense period of operation, during the time when Auschwitz surpassed Treblinka as the most lethal of the killing centers, 437,402 Jews were deported from Hungary primarily to Birkenau in the 54 day period between May 15th and July 8th on 147 trains, where most of them were killed upon arrival.

They were deported after everyone knew that Germany would lose the war, that the 1,000 year Reich would last – at most -- but a dozen years. They were killed after authorities in the West could have known – and should have known – of the scope and the scale of the killing process and of its location at Auschwitz and but little was done to halt the deportations or even to impede their progress. As Walter Laqueur wrote in the book we edited on The Bombing of Auschwitz: Should the Allies Have Attempted It? “In the end the pessimists won. They said that nothing could be done and nothing was done.”

In my own work I have focused particularly on the interrelationship on the structure of evil, the means by which the killers killed and its implications not only for history, but also for our collective future.

As you well know, death by gassing did not originate at Auschwitz; its roots are in the so-called “euthanasia program” that was used to kill those deemed “life unworthy of living.” Six death centers were established where killing was by gas. Gassing was employed after passive, what sociologist euphemistically call “clean” violence such as starvation, and more active means like sedatives and shootings proved too cumbersome to the killers. Gassing and cremation became the preferred means of murder; they were disguised as medical killing. The murder of the handicapped was a prefiguration of the Holocaust. . The killing centers to which the handicapped were transported were the antecedents of the death camps. The organized transportation of the handicapped foreshadowed mass deportation. Some of the physicians who became specialists in the technology of cold-blooded murder in the late 1930s later staffed the death camps. All their moral, professional and ethical inhibitions had long been lost.

During the German euthanasia program, psychiatrists were able to save some patients, at least temporarily, but only if they cooperated in sending others to their death. In the Jewish communities of the territories later conquered by the Nazis, Judenrat leaders, Jews appointed by the Germans to take charge of the ghettos, had to make similar choices. Unlike the psychiatrists who faced no danger if they refused to participate, Judenrat leaders were made personally responsible for carrying out German orders.