KRAKOW, Poland – Standing shoulder to shoulder with rabbis, educators, and activists on Tuesday at the Birkenau concentration camp, former UK prime minister Boris Johnson placed the horrors committed against Jews there in the context of “one million blood libels” stretching from the 1189 London massacre of Jews during the coronation of Richard the Lion Heart, to the shooting of Jewish worshipers in Manchester last month.
“It can happen again,” Johnson told European Jewish Association (EJA) delegates as memorial candles were lit, referring to the Holocaust, “because it did happen again.”
Representatives from the US, several European countries, and Israel laid wreaths.
Birkenau was built as an extension to Auschwitz and was constructed by German occupiers on lands from which Poles were largely expelled. The Nazi’s plans to expand were discussed even as the Red Army was approaching the death camp to free its inmates.
With around 400 souls crammed into each barrack, with one private room used by the barracks’ Kapo, the average prisoner would die within three months after arriving at Birkenau during the summer.
EJA visits Auschwitz
Part of the 40 Nazi camps that consisted of this Nazi-built hellscape, a telluric current emerged from Auschwitz-Birkenau. It engulfed Jews from all the way from Oslo, Rome, and Thessaloniki. Where the Nazi empire reached, there it clutched its talons.
Religion was not allowed in Auschwitz. In the museum at Auschwitz, for example, visitors can see Jewish prayer shawls stolen by the Nazis from murdered Jews.
Requests from the Krakow clergy to allow a Christmas Mass for the Polish inmates in Auschwitz were refused. Christmas food parcels, for the Poles, were approved. In Block 11, cell 21, Polish Home Army soldier Stefan Jasienski scratched “the Divine Mercy” on his wall. He died in January 1945.
EJA chairman Rabbi Menachem Margolin told those who gathered that on Passover, Jews worldwide praise God for delivering them from the hands of their foes who gather to destroy them in each generation.
“It is not only up to God,” he added. “All must do their part. If we fail to shape the world, those with evil ideas will.”
The uniqueness of Nazi evil encompassed cynicism, deceit, and cold materialism. Inmates ate their meager rations while German slogans above them taught them to be “honest” and “love the motherland.” The last lesson was removed after it was realized this message would not land well with war prisoners and resistance fighters.
Those few among the Jews who survived the medical selection process upon arrival and found themselves strong enough to work marched below the now infamous motto, “Work sets you free.” The irony was that no amount of work set any of the inmates free.
In the museum at Auschwitz, visitors can see the plates, even some potato peelers, that Jewish people brought with them, hoping to have some kind of new life in the east.
When the trains arrived, the inmates were under orders to lie to the Jewish victims and tell them that they should hurry and go to the showers because “their soup was getting cold” or “hot coffee is waiting for them.”
Those living through the Holocaust did not know they were the victims of a new and horrific form of crime. Why would they suspect the showers were gas chambers and the chimneys of the so-called “factories” that, they hoped, needed their working hands were really ovens?
The hair of the victims was stuffed into sacks marked KLA – Koncentracjon [concentration] Lager Auschwitz – and sent to a textile factory to make German army socks.
German sadism was so great that, if an escaped inmate was captured, he was forced to march around the camp beating a drum while shouting, “Hurrah! Hurrah! I am back to Auschwitz.” He was then hanged. Inmates were also forced to begin each day by singing the Lager song.
Inmates resisted. Of roughly 900 escape attempts from the camp, 300 were successful. The Sonderkommando revolt, a heroic act done by Communist French Jewish inmates and Polish Jews who, before the war, led a religious life, struck against the Nazi butchers.
In a place where army marches were the only approved music, inmates played the music of Chopin in secrecy, knowing they would be killed if caught. In Auschwitz, in the same structure where the starving blocks were, the Kapos’ room had a wall painting of a ship sailing.
It is likely that, to those who were young and healthy enough to survive the medical selection, Auschwitz seemed like a totally normal world that had gone mad.
This is why the word “Holocaust” points to a great sacrifice that has an almost divine aspect to it. The Yiddish and Roma words are different. Hurban, total devastation, Porajmos, the devouring, with the Romani being those being gobbled up by the Germans.
These words place the Holocaust in a context of human capacity for evil, which is always active in history as we know it in our own world.
This is in contrast to the idea of Auschwitz being, in the words of the writer Yehiel De-Nur (Ka-Tsetnik, a lager inmate and his pen name): “A different planet.” An event out of time and space brought upon by demonic, sinister forces.
Before leading the audience in prayer, the Chief Rabbi of the Netherlands, Binyomin Jacobs, shared how his father, a Holocaust survivor, told him when he was young that the Holocaust would never happen again.
As the years went by, Jacobs said, his father wavered, maybe it could happen again? “Before he passed away, my father warned me always to have cash in the house, in case it happens again,” he told attendees.
Speaking at the Hilton Hotel on Monday on improving Arab-Jewish relations, Egyptian activist Loay Alshareef said that the Arab world is poorer for not knowing more about the deep debt Islam has to Judaism.
“1.8 billion Muslims name their kids after Jewish kings and heroes without knowing the details,” he said.
“It was ‘Daud’ (David), king of Israel, who made Jerusalem the capital of Israel, not US President Donald Trump.”
He has a point. Details are what enable us to paint a truer, yet never perfect, understanding of the past and a vision of the future.
Even in Auschwitz, some were able to sacrifice their life to save others, like Catholic Priest Maximilian Kolbe, who volunteered to die of starvation to save the life of another Polish inmate.
In Oświęcim, Holocaust survivor Szymon Kluger was unable to rebuild his life after the war and spent most of his days in his family’s home as a recluse.
Thanks to the generosity of his family, after he passed away in 2000, that building now serves as Museum Oszpicinin, a Jewish culture center and kosher café in a town where, before the war, more than half the population were Jews.