Voices & Opinion

视角：奥斯维辛集中营解放75年后，我们如何确保它不再发生？

We need to stand up to anti-Semitism and every other form of bigotry

On January 27, 1945, 75 years ago today, the Soviet Red Army came upon the remnants of a place that has since been seared into the memory of civilized humanity as a symbol of the unspeakable horrors wreaked by the Nazis and their collaborators during the Second World War. While tending to a few thousand surviving inmates left behind by the retreating SS, the Russians gradually pieced together evidence of the atrocities committed. The evidence meticulously gathered over months of grueling work was later used in the Nuremberg trials.

我

The largest death camp established in occupied Poland, and named after the nearby town of Oswiecim, Auschwitz was a sprawling complex of about 50 different lagers that served different purposes. In 1940, one year into their occupation of Poland, the Germans began to use former Polish army barracks at Oswiecim as a concentration camp for Polish political prisoners. As many as 140,000 non-Jewish Polish citizens were eventually imprisoned at Auschwitz, many of whom died of starvation, sickness, neglect, exhaustion, or execution.  

The Germans began mass executions of Jews in 1941, following the attack on the Soviet Union. In 1942, looking for greater efficiency, the heads of the political police assembled at Berlin Wannsee (in an expropriated Jewish villa) decided on what they called the “Final Solution” (Endlösung) of the “Jewish question.” Auschwitz II (Birkenau) was built as one of several extermination camps (Vernichtungslager) to accommodate as many as 100,000 prisoners at any given time. A third camp (Auschwitz III Monowitz) housed slave laborers employed in the IG Farben chemical works located at Buna.

Now, 75 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, we are no closer to comprehending the magnitude of this catastrophe. Visiting Auschwitz with Oprah Winfrey in 2006, the late Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel (Hon.’74), BU’s Andrew W. Mellon Professor Emeritus in the Humanities and a College of Arts & Sciences professor emeritus of philosophy and religion, said he had no words to describe what it was like. In a 1982 interview with Daniel Toaff, Primo Levi disarmingly confessed that he found Nazi ideology incomprehensible. Neither of these statements grant permission to deny the facts. The facts are clear. The evidence is literally overwhelming. A combination of sober engineering, ingenious cruelty, and sheer opportunism, the remnants of this complex of large-scale theft, exploitation, enslavement, dehumanization, rogue medical experimentation, and mass annihilation is a staggering monument to what human beings can do to other human beings.

Reading about Auschwitz is nauseating, but we must look reality in the face. Why? Why isn’t all this a matter of the past? It won’t be unless we make sure it is. For that we must read, study, listen to the testimony of survivors, the eyewitness accounts of those who were there. We must also study and comprehend what motivated the perpetrators. Here at Boston University, we research the destruction of European Jewry, the Armenian genocide, Rwanda, war crimes, and other crimes against humanity. That is why we created a degree program in Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights Studies. One of the founding faculty of this program is Michael Grodin, a widely published School of Public Health professor of health law, ethics, and human rights and a School of Medicine professor of psychiatry and of family medicine, who facilitates undergraduate and graduate research on medicine and the Holocaust and regularly teaches a course on the Holocaust and bioethics.

A better, more capacious imagination

机汇

Students affiliated with the BU Hillel regularly arrange for survivors to speak at BU, so students can hear their voices and connect with the past. But we are now at a point in time where those old enough to remember are often too old or confused to recall their stories to an audience. This is why we need institutions committed to the documentation and preservation of the voices of the past, such as the USC Shoah Foundation, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, and Yad vaShem.

Studying the history of genocide is important, but facts are not enough. We also need to develop our imagination. Fostering a more capacious imagination also requires the study of literature. This was the mission of Elie Wiesel. Over the decades of his tenure at Boston University, he challenged and nourished the imagination of his students, not by teaching history, but by having them read and discuss great works of literature, by using literature to broaden their imagination.

If Auschwitz is a symbol, what does it stand for? Auschwitz stands for the erasure of much of Jewish life in Europe. Two out of every three Jews who lived in Europe before the war were killed. The lucky ones became refugees or survived in hiding. It is also a symbol of the breakdown of European civilization and an indication of how quickly entire societies can submit to totalitarian rule. Auschwitz stands for the perversion of the political, cultural, administrative, social, military, and economic institutions of a modern state by a movement committed to an absurd pseudoscientific doctrine. It was part of a state-sponsored criminal operation on the grandest scale. Auschwitz attests to what human beings can do to other human beings when the institutions of a state are harnessed to a radical criminal imagination. Auschwitz did not happen outside of history. Human beings did this to other human beings, just as human beings do terrible things to human (and other) beings today.

所以