PBS has been doing an excellent series on the Holocaust called Auschwitz: Inside the Nazi State. Lori and I watched the first in the series and I found it very haunting. In particular there was a segment about the commandant of Auchwitz who after the war wrote this in his memoirs:
Small children usually cried because of the strangeness of being undressed in this way, but when their mothers or members of the jewishsonderkommando comforted them, they became calm and entered the gas Chambers playing or joking with one another and carrying their toys. Hundreds of men and women in the full Bloom of life walked all unsuspecting to their death in the gas Chambers under the Blossom-Laden...
If that doesn't keep you up at night, especially if you have young children, frankly, I don't know what will.
I visited Dachau as a kid. I can still remember it as if it were yesterday. The Arbeit Macht Frei door. The double lined fences. The ovens. The barracks. The eternal fire. The museum with the ranked list.
People question the Holocaust and ask how it could have happened, even going so far as to say that the victims let it happen to themselves. What they fail to understand is that by the time it was in full swing the Holocaust was a complete system that was supported by propoganda, policy and weaponry. There was nowhere to escape to, no way to get away, it was everywhere.
It was just 60 years ago and already people struggle to remember it, or even deny that it happened. And genocide has happened several times since then. It's all so very depressing.
The transcript is complements of Google's new video search engine.
Posted by jherr at January 25, 2005 08:01 AMThanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)
(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)