Understanding Auschwitz

Rudolf Höss at the moment of extradition to Polish authorities, 1946.

In his 1976 novel Sophie’s Choice, a story about an Auschwitz survivor, William Styron says of another piece of writing KL Auschwitz: Seen by the SS: “Certainly it should be read throughout the world by professors of philosophy, ministers of the Gospel, rabbis, shamans, all historians, writers, politicians, and diplomats, liberationsists of whatever sex and persuasion, lawyers, judges, penologists, stand-up comedians, film directors, journalists, in short, any one concerned remotely with affecting the consciousness of his fellow-man- and this would include our own beloved children, those incipient American leaders at the eighth-grade level, who should be required to study it along with The Catcher in the Rye, The Hobbit, and the Constitution.” 

Published by the Auschwitz-Birkenau museum KL Auschwitz: Seen by the SS is a collection of excerpts from three people who worked at Auschwitz at various times and in various capacities: Rudolf Höss- commandant of Auschwitz 1940-43, Pery Broad-  SS Guard 1941-45, Johann Paul Kremer- Doctor at Auschwitz for three months in 1942. It is a perfect companion to Sophie’s Choice which at its core deals with the residual effects of just one survivor of the nazi attrocities. In the novel you have the fictional but highly realistic character of Sophie who is a Polish Catholic and who despite having Aryan features and an infamously anti-semitic father is nonetheless swept up in an SS roundup and along with her young children is deposited in Auschwitz where she does what she can to survive (you can imagine the degradations she puts herself through) and just barely makes it out with her life. Diseased and starved she nearly succumbs to despair but manages to make it to America where another sad chapter of her life begins as she struggles with the memories of what had happened to her. Hers is a story of arbitrary authority and how it can insert itself violently into a human life. Despite having made all of the careful choices in one’s life, a person can still be haphazardly sucked up into a brutal prison for no other reason than pure oversight. It needn’t even be malice on the part of one’s persecutor rather just one of those things, a matter of bad luck.

The members of the SS have their side of the story too don’t they? Why did Styron think it so important for nearly everyone to read their account? I think most of us can imagine why. It is important to understand the motivations behind evil. In today’s world where it is a pastime if not an obsession to delve into the minutiae of serial killers, mass murderers and monsters be it through books, podcasts, Netflix documentaries and true crime conventions we are given many opportunities to gaze into the abyss of human cruelty. This book, bereft of slick editing and music, gives us a very unsexy look at the truth behind the SS’s crimes. The numbers are staggering. Some 1.1 million people were murdered at Auschwitz. 1.1 million individuals. 1.1 million complicated lives, messy and imperfect but beautiful in their own ways. Much has been written about the sadism of the SS, the gleeful joy in which they murdered their victims, and a lot can be credited to the brainwashing of an entire population by Hitler for the blind ways in which the German populace carried out his commands. But there is a far more complicated side to the story that isn’t as easy to capture in movies and TV docu-series. Here, you have the more mundane but infinitely more important evidence of what Hannah Arednt deemed “the banality of evil.” 

For Höss it was a matter of blaming the victims themselves. He claimed that it was easy to escape Auschwitz and that prisoners had a “90%” chance of success if they did manage to escape. Assertions that hardly need debunking: Guards, electric fences, German shepherds and the isolation of the prison being just a few of the obstacles an escapee would encounter. He focuses on the fact that many victims turned on one another, went to the gas chambers “with a calm resignation,” and all sorts of other turns of phrase to suggest that the victims were just as much a part of their destruction as their killers. It was as if he thought that the victims should be on trial with him for their part in the whole holocaust debacle. In all three accounts, and there are reasons to find them credible, these men didn’t particularly love what they were doing; Kremer called Auschwitz “The asshole of the world,” they didn’t get a hard-on at the sound of Jews screaming, they didn’t count the numbers of personal kills by notching the butt’s of their rifles. They woke up, did their duty, cried a bit on the inside (in some cases) and then went on with their day. What strikes one in reading these accounts is not the inhumanity, it's the indifference. The way these men were able to compartmentalize their behavior is a sick warning to what every human is capable of doing. Genocide for breakfast, rabbit and dumplings for dinner. 

KL Auschwitz contains a deposition from Stanislaw Dubiel a prisoner who worked as Höss’s gardener. It is from him that we find out how Hedwig, the commandant’s wife, made happy from all of the extra food rations and other items stolen from the prisoners, hoped that she would live the rest of her life and in fact die in Auschwitz, though I am sure she had a different death from that of the notorious gas chambers in mind for herself. It was from the deposition of Janina Szczurek that we find out how the Höss children wanted little colored triangles sewn onto their clothes just like the prisoners had so that they could play at being prisoners in their cozy home built adjacent to the camp. If one is to visit the camp, as I have, one is struck by how close the commandant's house is to the rest of the prison. Indeed there is no way one can live in that house and claim any ignorance as to what was happening beyond the barbed wire. These anecdotes are like a David Lynch movie on steroids. Imagine finding the perfect home in a gated community. It has a theater, beautifully manicured garden, personal seamstresses, private hair salon, horse stables and plenty of room to entertain your guests. We have all seen this billboard or magazine advert. The catch? The air you breathe is chalk full of the remnants of your fellow human beings sent skyward by the massive crematoria right next to the horse stables and across from the movie theater.      

In Sophie’s Choice the narrator Stingo tries to naively understand Auschwitz before coming to the conclusion that no one can ever understand Auschwitz. It’s a bit of a paradox I think. On one hand it is profoundly simple - one is a part of many, the many are at war with another many, they both have a duty to win the war, to lose means destruction to win means history is rewritten in the victor’s favor, beep-bop-boop-beep, pretty simple. On the other side you have that overwhelming, crushing question as to how human beings can bayonette the skulls of their fellow human beings’ living babies? It’s maddening! We probably can never understand it fully but by god we can never stop trying. It was built like so many other things: Brick by brick, hour by hour, day by day. It took time and planning and money and indifference. I think about it often. I think about it when I read about the detention centers for migrants at our southern borders. I think about it when I hear about the mistreatment and deaths of American prisoners. I think about it whenever I see arbitrary authority snuffing out human lives like in the case of George Floyd. These were men and women who perpetrated these crimes and men and women and children who were the victims. If we are not the perpetrators how many of us are merely living adjacent to evil? We can not remain forever as residents in a junkyard of triviality, peering over the fence and shaking our heads at the evil that men do. We’re running out of places to move. It is time to speak. It is time to confront.  

A Question of Proportion: I’m a “Piece of S*!T”

This should never happen.

“When the looting starts the shooting starts” our 45th president tweeted in the aftermath of the Minneapolis protests against the police killing of George Floyd on Memorial Day. Let’s forget for a moment all of the events that lead to that statement and just unpack it a bit. When disorganized groups of people destroy property and take objects that don’t belong to them, the appropriate response is shooting them. Does this by itself seem fair, reasonable or proportional?   

I was scrolling through my Facebook newsfeed the other night when I saw that a friend of mine had posted video footage of a Target store in Minneapolis being looted. Her caption: “This is absolutely disgusting.” Underneath, another person wrote “How is this justice? Nothing makes this ok.” I think of myself as a thoughtful person and an empathetic one. I like Target, I have had some wonderful times in their deli section and yet I am not “disgusted” by this footage. It is hard for me to conjure up outrage over it. I don’t like it. I feel uncomfortable with sudden outbursts of uncontrollable destruction. I don’t hate the owners of department stores but I also do not have that much attachment to concrete and plastic, not enough anyway to feel genuine pangs of disgust. On the other hand, I look at that photo of Derek Chauvin with his knee crushing George Floyd’s neck and “disgust” doesn’t even begin to describe what I feel.

I like to, whenever possible, reduce things to their simplest and most basic elements, if only because it helps me to make sense of more complicated structures. So with that in mind I ask, when is it ever appropriate to bear down on a person’s neck while their hands are bound behind their back? With as much empathy and understanding as I can muster for a police officer the answer I come up with again and again is never. Again, never! What was Chauvin afraid of? What police training could he possibly have been summoning to muscle memory in this scenario? Let’s say for the sake of argument that Floyd was resisting in the worst way possible, wriggling and kicking about, gnashing his teeth or even springing to his feet and running away down the street with his hands still behind his back. What threat could he possibly have presented to the public to make it necessary to subdue him with such force that he died choking out the words: “I can’t breath”? Speaking again about proportion let us not forget the charge against Mr. Floyd - forgery. He allegedly passed a phony $20 bill to a clerk in exchange for some cigarettes. Just think of this for a moment, in exchange for a crumpled piece of paper bearing the smeared image of a racist president a man had to die, just to have the current president threaten to shoot people for breaking and entering and theft.

On that same friend’s Facebook post another wrote “Wow.. a free pass to be a piece of shit human” in reference to the looters. If being a piece of shit human is to react strongly and emotionally to collective injustices in one’s community and one’s nation then I would be happy to consider myself a piece of shit human. Two wrongs do not make a right and yes non-violent protest is most often morally the better way to go. But what does our society expect to happen? What reaction is appropriate when we see the violence being committed against minorities so explicitly and justice all too often not being done to hold those in power accountable? We need understanding and empathy for the protesters. We need to know why they are acting the way they are acting. We can do this without condoning but must we condemn out of pocket? We are all cooped up from COVID quarantine, millions have lost their jobs because of it. We all see the same news and we all know what’s happening but our reactions are all out of proportion. People are suffering. Some more than others. Is it so disgusting that some of us are reacting violently against violence being perpetrated in our communities?

To bookend President Trump’s provocative call to shoot looters perhaps there is an even better quote. This quote, to me, is the defining statement of the 2020’s. This is the quote that should be a rallying cry for everyone who is sick of the lack of justice, the violence against minorities, the favoring of large corporations’ bottom lines over those of average working people when it comes to handing out relief during a pandemic. The quote is from Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota referring to the rioters: “...there are simply more of them than us.” Damn right there are.