Auschwitz and the holocaust remembered

(By the time you read this, I will be in New Delhi, India. On the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the "liberation" of Auschwitz and the United Nations’ observance of the horror of the Holocaust, I am reprinting the column I wrote from Poland last October 27, 2004 – four months ago).

AUSCHWITZ-BIRKENAIL to LASNA CÓPA, Poland – You’ve seen the movie, Schindler’s List, watched dozens of TV documentaries about the horrors of the Nazi Death Camp called "Auschwitz" in which more than 1.5 million Jews perished, deliberately gassed, or worked and starved to death – Adolf Hitler’s "Final Solution" to the Jewish problem.

Probably the figure of 1.5 million Jews killed is short of reality – Israel claims 3 million. Indeed, most of the Jews brought in by train from the rest of occupied Poland, Upper Silesia, Slovakia, France, Belgium, Holland, Norway, Lithuania, Hungary and even Greece were herded to the gas chambers without registration or identification. Many of them had come from as far as 2,400 kilometers away in sealed freight-car wagons, crowded together like cattle without food or water for seven to 10 days’ travel. Some were already dead by the time the box car doors were opened.

Not only Jews were "eliminated" in Auschwitz (Oswiecim) I and Auschwitz II in the nearby town of Birkenau where more efficient gas chambers and crematoria were installed. Scores of thousands of Poles, slated to be destroyed as Untermenschen: 21,000 Gypsies; Czechs; Yugoslavs; Frenchmen; Germans were sent there, too.

Twelve thousand Soviet prisoners-of-war were brought here, too. Within five months, as many as 8,320 of the Russians had died. Some were gassed, others shot, while the rest succumbed to starvation and disease.

I’ve visited the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, and the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC. But the monstrosity of it doesn’t sink in until you actually come to Auschwitz and walk through the gate of that Factory of Death, with the deceptive words in black metal forming an arch at the entrance: "ARBEIT MACH FREI" (Work Makes You Free). This was the most hideous lie of all. Only death freed the prisoners – overwork and emaciation killed those who weren’t sent to the gas chambers. Or "execution" by musketry.

"Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter" would have been a more appropriate archway.

As you trudge into the camp, the weight of the dead souls (as Gogol once described it) descends on you. Ghosts, perhaps, whisper into your ear, the vibration of invisible hands reaching out gives one an eerie feeling. With each step into the camp, depression seeps into your soul.

What was poignant about our visit was that everywhere, wearing identical white pull-overs emblazoned in bright blue with the Star of David, and inscribed with the word, Israel, were groups of teenagers led by older, accompanying persons, focusing on a pilgrimage to a shrine where so many Jews had perished – herded, helpless as sheep to the slaughter.

For five years, between 1940 and 1945 that compound had been the last destination for millions of their race, as one book had dubbed it, The Address of Death.

Now, Israeli kids were there to see for themselves. I watched each group enter the cellblocks, gaze at the grisly exhibits of mountains of blonde hair – 7 kilograms of it – stripped from dead Jewish women to be sent to factories manufacturing the sort of hair-cloth utilized to make linings for the jackets of the military. Piles of discarded eyeglasses, their owners sightless in death. A room full of abandoned prosthetic legs, feet, or crutches.

The Israeli teenagers attempted to joke and, in the beginning, try to make light of their bizarre experience. Yet, furtively, some of them would start to dab at an unbidden tear in the eye. They learn from one of the 150 guides assigned to them that gold rings and other jewellery had been snatched from the victims, just as they entered the gas chambers. Gold teeth were also filed afterwards from the corpses. All this gold was melted down to be transformed into gold ingots for the coffers of the state bank – enriching the war effort.

In the gas chambers, the young persons from Israel are even more affected, even though, from sheer embarrassment, they strive to conceal it. They see a diorama, in stark grey, about how Jewish prisoners were pushed, unresisting into the gas chambers – not one of them demonstrating any defiance or protest. They had been told to remember where they had folded and left their clothes so they would be able to recover them after their "bath". How eagerly had they accepted that lie. Once locked inside, as the pitiful diorama portrayed them, they twisted in sheer agony as the deadly Cyclon B, a rat killer the Nazis discovered to be more effective on humans, descended from vents in the ceiling. The German firm, Degesch, which manufactured the gas, realized profits from sales of that poison, between 1941-1944, a profit of 300,000 marks.

Why had the ill-starred Jews not fought for their lives? They had hoped, perhaps, to the very end, to be released from compassion or pity. Most of the Jews who arrived to be extinguished had stumbled into the camp convinced they were being "deported" for "resettlement" in Eastern Europe.

In Hungary and Greece, smiling Nazis had sold them non-existent acres of land for a "new beginning", or offered them jobs in non-existent factories. The deportees bundled their most valuable possessions into cardboard suitcases or pathetic bundles. The Nazis piled these piteous treasures into warehouses, to be looted by themselves or dispatched to Germany to folks at home.

I found out, afterwards, why so many young Israelis, boys and girls in their teens, had been brought to view the Death Blocks of Auschwitz I and II, and feel empathy and pain. The Israeli government underwrites, annually, such pilgrimages so their sabra and other young persons may know what could await them if they were complacent and refused to fight. Soon enough, those giggling kids, their faces turn sober, will be drafted into the IDF – the Israeli Defense Force. They were in Oswiecim and Birkenau to see for themselves what plight awaited them and their families if they did not do their part in defending their embattled, spat-upon, and "despised" race. Their Biblical "homeland" in Israel, surrounded by Arab enemies out to exterminate them, the subliminal message goes, must be defended at all costs. The IDF soldiers carry a patch on their upper arm, referring to "Massada" the mountain-top fortress of their zealots which was captured by Rome’s Xth Legion, its defenders slaying their own families and committing suicide rather than be dragged off into captivity. The patch vows in Ivrit: Massada shall not fall again!

The Jerusalem government of Ariel Sharon knows that the baking ovens and crematoria, the grisly remains of Auschwitz, are their most powerful "recruiting" poster. The Jews come home from that grim camp in the sunny fields of Poland – not far from the glittering city of Cracow – determined that there will be no more Auschwitzes. No more Bergen-Belsens, Buchenwalds, Dachaus and Kloogas.

Our pretty, light blue-eyed, blonde guide tells me that her mother is member of the Polish government committee which supervises the exhibits and museum of the Death Camp. "Do you guide such tours everyday?" I inquire. She shakes her head sadly: "Not everyday, perhaps once or twice a week. It is too . . . much."

We leave Auschwitz and pile into our Volvo, speeding off into the sunny countryside, the fields fallow, the trees prettily festooned in autumn colors of gold, red, ochre. The approach of winter is already in the air, but Poland is in raiment so radiant that the forests seem aflame with the turning of the leaves before they fall into the dust.

From Gdansk in the chilly north to warmer Cracow, we can spot Polish families already in their cemeteries cleaning up their family graves, scrubbing the headstones, clearing out the weeds, bringing cute bunches of yellow flowers to pay initial tribute to their dead. Catholic Poland, like Catholic Philippines, flocks to the cemeteries to commemorate All Saints’ Day. In our case, Todos los Santos. Everyone a saint in heaven after death.

Back in Auschwitz who will say Kaddish for the innumerable Jewish dead – many of them unknown, unidentified, consigned to the oblivion of forgetfulness? We bear away from that Address of Death the burden of the whispered pleading to those lost souls.

If you’re weak of heart, a caveat, don’t ever go to Auschwitz. It will overwhelm you.

* * *

What saved us yesterday lay just an hour and a half down the winding road. We came to the limestone hills of Jura Cracow-Czestochowska on the Warta River. The place had evolved from a knights’ village dating back to the year 1377.

In the Western part of the city there is a 293-meter high hill surrounded by fortified walls and a park, named Jasna Gora (Luminous Hill), which I prefer to translate as Shining Hill. The name Jasna Gora was imported by the Pauline Monks, that white-robed order which guards the shrine of Poland’s most beloved, miraculous Black Madonna. The name was taken from St. Laurence’s original Monastery in Buda – in Claro Monte Budensi, which was their home friary.

Here is the patroness of Poland whom they call, in utter reverence, "Mother of God". How many times that endearment, that title passes Polish lips. The painting of the Black Madonna, her right cheek gashed (by a tear?) dates back to the year 1382. Where had the scar come from? The story goes that the fame of the monastery had spread as a place of pilgrimage and a depository of precious votive offerings. On April 14, 1430, a band of Hussites from Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia swooped down on the Monastery, slaughtered the guardian monks, broke into the chapel of the Virgin. The intruders tore the image from the altar, stripped it of all valuables, then slashed the Madonna’s face with their swords. They flung the painting to the ground, breaking the icon into three parts.

The report is that the painting was lovingly restored by King Ladislaus Jagiello in his court in Cracow (often spelled Krakow). The king decided to convert the shrine into a fortress to protect the Virgin. This resolve was carried on by his successors in the Vasa Dynasty, Kings Sigismund III and Ladislaus IV.

On July 21, 1655, a Swedish army of 3,725 men led by King Carolus Gustavus Vasa swept through Poland, capturing Warsaw, Poznan and Cracow. In a 40-day fight, the small garrison of Marian knights – 170 soldiers, 20 noblemen and 70 friars – stoutly defended Our Lady’s Monastery. News of the battle, it’s related, so outraged the nation that the "entire country" rose up in arms and repelled the Swedish invaders. On April 1, 1656, King John Casimir, in a solemn vow in the Lvov Cathedral (Lvov, ironically, is now part of the Ukraine) decreed himself and his country henceforth under the "protection" of the Mother of God, proclaiming her Patroness and Queen of the Kingdom of Poland.

So there she stands. And thus did we behold her on that depressing day. Our car wove its way through thongs of worshippers. A concelebrated Mass was going on in her Chapel. We caught the consecration and Holy Communion, and the blessing. A trumpet blew. The bells pealed. The Black Madonna looked compassionately down at the sea of upturned faces – the Polish people reaffirming their devotion and their love.

My late father once gifted to me, as a small boy, with a book in which there was a chapter entitled, Glorious Poland. It spoke of bravery, constancy and faith – of a fighting nation surrounded on all sides by powerful and ruthless neighbors. Despite the long nightmare of Communism, and the Warsaw Pact, Poland remains true to the Virgin. The present President, Aleksander Kwasniewski, a former Communist, is an atheist (the euphemism for this is "agnostic".) Yet he enjoys unusual popularity ratings into his second term – ranging from 67 to 85 percent! He’s plagued by a scandal singing the skirts of his loyal subaltern, Prime Minister Marek Belka. But the Poles, in spite of 19 percent unemployment, respect him. They do not insist he, too, pay homage to the Black Madonna, merely address himself to the Black Economy.

Yet, it is faith in the "Mother of God" which sustains this nation. In truth, her "blessing" must have lifted our spirits, for all the evil funk we had accumulated at Auschwitz almost "miraculously" fell away. Who am I, though, to claim miracles? For 600 years, the Black Madonna has been dispensing them to the multitudes.

Pope John Paul II (Papa Karol Wojtyla) lived nearby in the royal city of Cracow for four decades, practically his early adult life. There he was a student, a young priest, a theologian and philosopher, a playwright and a poet. From humble curate at St. Florian’s church to university professor, to bishop to cardinal – to the Vicar of Christ, the first non-Italian Supreme Pontiff in hundreds of years, was his dizzying ascension! The most traveled Pope in history, the Shepherd who jets to his flock, John Paul II – already appearing crippled and frail – refuses to go until Our Lady of Fatima fetches him. Why not the Black Madonna?

In any event, they adore him in Poland. He’s on all the stamps in every conceivable pose. Born in Wadewiso, a town some 30 miles southwest of Cracow, he studied in an underground seminary during the five long years of Nazi occupation.

It was he who defied his country’s Communist rulers. From the day he was elected Pope in October 1978, his labors and peregrinations have been ceaseless. I told Father Roman, the Pauline monk who came out to greet and guide us: "Father, we Filipinos are a nation of 80 million Catholics. When the Pope came to Manila he was greeted by three million people!"

Father Roman smiled, then gently reproved me: "Yes, eighty million Catholics – but no more vocations!" That’s a thought. I pondered on this long after Father Roman left us to "blow his bugle". Perhaps God did not send us more vocations since our bishops and clergy seemed more involved in politics than in helping us, the faithful, seek the Kingdom of Heaven. Yet who knows what’s in their hearts?

Here in Poland, you can see it, feel it. When you enter a chapel or church, the choir sings in heartfelt wonder. The congregation prays. In Gransk, St. Mary’s Church had been almost totally leveled by the war. Built between 1342 to 1502, it had been destroyed in minutes of bombardment and fire. The people patiently rebuilt it, brick by brick, to its original specifications. You can once more see it standing on Kosciot Mariacki, once again the fifth largest historical church in Europe, the biggest brick church in the world. It can contain 25,000 worshippers in a single service! And the church is packed on Sundays.

In Cracow, there too is the towering St. Mary’s Church on the Market Square, magnificent inside, but we nipped into the little chapel next door, St. Barbara’s because we heard singing and the chords of an organ. Inside a reverent service was going on. I marvel at the Faith of Poland’s 38 million people, through all their vicissitudes and disappointments.

They are truly children of the Mother of God. Glorious Poland! my father had said. He was right.