Lessons from Auschwitz

by Nagalingam Kumarakuruparan

History has a wicked whim to organise human destinies. It has its own theme, its own grammar, and its own screenplay. Only time will unravel when it opens the window to look back to allow the last laugh.

The human history would have been different, had Adolf Hitler, that man of destiny, not been allowed to get away during World War I by Henry Tandey, which cost 60 million lives besides the gruesome holocaust.

A brave soldier he was at that time, Tandey regretted the lapse until his death some 86 years - saying his compassion towards the lanky Bavarian was the greatest disservice to humanity.

"Fate has selected me for my mission" and how right he was, and how gruesome was the mission. In fact, he used to have a philosophical penchant of death.

He said, "Death would only have been a release from sorry, sleepless nights and great nervous suffering', and this by a man who created those sleepless nights for millions of people in his lifetime.

Testimony

Auschwitz in Poland today stands testimony to this gruesome episode in history. Though Auschwitz today has the look of a place that has exorcised all its ghosts it was where thousands were mercilessly butchered.

Scrubbed and cleaned, the barracks that saw the torture and extermination of more than a million prisoners by Nazis during the World War II , 90 percent of them Jews, have been wiped clean of the scent of fear and pain.

The sanitised environ is in sharp contrast with the depraved inhumanity and breach of human rights this site witnessed. But then you come to the rooms that house within large glass cases. Tufts of hair from the heads of more than 100,000 Jewish prisoners, shoes, suitcases, marked with their names, baby clothes and baby shoes - and the reality of the tragedy hit across the decades.

Images

These are the images you carry away with you indeed it is important to be able to feel we wish to feel because we care. We choose to remember this tragedy and be affected by it as part of an unspoken resolve not to let it recur. Hitler launched his war against Poland with a crime on the evening of August 31, 1939.

Nine hours before his armies invaded Poland, armed SS men in Polish uniforms stormed a German forestry station on the boarders of Upper Silesia.

Simultaneously, other SS men posing as Poles attacked the German radio station at Glewitz. Having overpowered the staff they tied them up. They took over the broadcasting station.

Later the SS men withdraw, pistols blazing to render their mock attack more credible, they left a wounded civilian at the entrance to the building. He was later identified as a prisoner named Franz Honick, who had been arrested for the purpose and dumped there.

Material evidence

The unfortunate man had been deliberately shot and fatally wounded in time to die at the scene as material evidence of Polish Perfidy.

Later at Hochlinden, six dead Poles were left - in reality selected prisoners from the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp who had been murdered to serve as photographic, evidence for the benefit of Hitler's press and propaganda machine. Hitler accused Poland for attacking German assets and cited these border incidents to declare war against Poland.

Auschwitz was a notorious concentration and extermination camp. It was a gigantic complex embracing 39 subsidiary camps. It was a centre for industrialised mass murder, today Auschwitz has become a famous tourist site in Poland.

This is Dark Tourism - the appeal of sites associated with tragedy and inhumanity. As Prof. J. Lennon who coined the team 'Dark Tourism' says in an article in The Telegraph , "visiting Dark Tourism sites is a crucial way for us to learn the lessons of the past".

He warns that not to record may encourage future generations to forget terrible periods of human history.

'Dark Tourism' , like our dark history occupies an important part of our understanding of what it is to be humans.

Dark Tourism sites are a journey of intellectual curiosity and a horrific, but necessary reminder of the cruelty we are capable of. We go there to remind ourselves that this happened and to sensitise ourselves to the need for preventing such atrocities.

Recurrence

Though we may reject the possibility of a recurrence, can we be so sure that history will not repeat itself. The fact is, as historian Laurence Ree says, "People don't change, circumstances do". It becomes exceedingly important to remember and empathise, else we repeat our dark history, again and again. History has a wicked whim to organise human destinies.