'A cry of despair, a warning to humanity'

Today, January 27, 2025, is the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz extermination camp. I'd like to share something I wrote last year when I visited the camp as part of my research into my mother's life as a slave worker for the Nazis. 

A single red shoe, in a pile of black shoes. A wooden crutch, poking out of a jumble of artificial limbs. A braid of black hair, on a mountain of braids of hair. How many braids of hair in the mountain? Here, they count them not by the braid, but by the ton. And there are two tons of human hair in this pile alone.

This is Auschwitz. Testament to man's infinite and imaginative capacity to destroy his fellow human beings.

Between 1940 and 1945 the Nazis deported at least 1,300,000 people to Auschwitz. One million one hundred thousand of them died here, most of them in the gas chambers. It was killing on an industrial scale.

As I walked between the barracks where prisoners slept four or five to one small bunk, along the double row of electrified fence, and through the killing complex of gas chamber and crematorium, my guide Camil asked how I was feeling.

"My eyes are dry," I told him. "But I am weeping inside. My heart is broken."

I stood at the spot where trains brought cattle trucks of men, women and children. I know that in that same spot had stood a Nazi officer. All the new arrivals were herded in line to face him. In less time than it took me to write this sentence, he pointed to the left or the right. 

Those who were sent to the right were shuffled straight into gas chambers.

Did that mean, I asked my guide, that those sent to the left were reprieved? Not at all, he told me. Their death was simply delayed until they had been worked to the point where they were incapable of more work.

Inside the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp complex there is a monument to those who arrived here, and never left. It's about 100 meters long, a mass of giant stones, with an inscription that says 'For ever let this place be a cry of despair and a warning to humanity.'

It's a sombre and sobering memorial, standing as it does between the ruins of two gas chambers and crematoria the Nazis blew up when it was clear their war was lost.

But for me the memorial pales against the memory of that red shoe, the crutch, the braid of hair, or the suitcase with the name Alice Frankl painted on the outside. In those images I see the people who perished here. I imagine the hopes they had for their lives. The dreams they had for their children. 

And I think of the line by Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana inscribed on the entrance to one of the barracks: "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it."