Someday, I will have to go there

I have a small family. It would be much larger, but for the fact that a great number of my relatives were murdered by the Germans in World War II. They weren’t brought to concentration camps. In fact, they never made it that far. Instead, they were shot right in their home town. It was a mass execution, and that was that.

This mass killing was all too common during the war. The Germans didn’t always bother shipping Jews—and other victims—off to concentration camps. Sometimes they just killed them right where they found them (in this case, in their homes in the Ukraine), often after forcing some of them to dig ditches that would serve as their own graves.

Despite the particular circumstances of the deaths of these family members, I feel a pull to see the concentration camps myself, perhaps because they are tangible reminders of the unspeakable evil unleashed on the world not so long ago. Growing up, I saw films of the camps, motion pictures of gas chambers, starved prisoners and piles of corpses being bulldozed into mass graves. It’s all etched deeply into my mind, and it will never leave. How could it?

So, with all of this well established, my family history as well as the overall history of the Holocaust, why should I travel thousands of miles to see this? Well, I don’t know the answer to that, really, but I feel a pull. I’ve been reading articles about the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, and I feel like I need to find the time, at some point in my life, to go stand face-to-face with these remnants of this terrible evil.

It’s still unimaginable that any human being could deliberately plan the mass extermination of another group of human beings, but it surely happened. Worse yet, it continues to happen. We’ve seen genocidal acts in my lifetime, and we must always be on guard against the hatred that is capable of unleashing such mass murder on any population.

In today’s New York Times, the head of the European Jewish Congress made the terrifying point that the transition from the acts of mass vandalism of Kristallnacht, where Jewish shops were vandalized, to the Wannsee Conference, where German leaders discussed the “final solution to the Jewish question in Europe” happened in just a few years—“the blink of an eye,” as he said.

Let us also remember that it wasn’t just the Jews, although we were the main target (as a gay Jew, I really would have been a prime target). The Germans planned to wipe out any race of people they deemed inferior. This could happen to anyone, although we Jews are the prime example and remain a favorite target of many in this world. The thing that strikes the most terror in my heart is that Germany managed to do this.

Those who are students of history will realize that, prior to this time, Germany was a country that valued tolerance and put a premium on intellectual achievement. If Germany could turn into this butchering monster, any country could.

The article in the Times ends on a note that really sends a reminder of what even those who survived the camps went through. One survivor who went back years ago noticed that something looked different—there was grass there. So what’s the big deal about grass? It’s this—there was no grass to be seen when she was there, because the starving prisoners had eaten it all.

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Addendum: This is well worth the time it takes to read it. I found it to be a very moving (and troubling) column.