Seeing the Holocaust

(Part 2)

WASHINGTON, D.C.–The pictures at the Holocaust Museum tell the story of the Jews’ horror and utter humiliation. One museum in Poland still maintains piles of human hair cut from prisoners. Many were used as materials for brushes used by the fashion-conscious in Berlin. The Holocaust Museum has old pictures of this hair, neatly bundled by workers in the camps, each package weighing hundreds of kilos.

Those in the camps were essentially on starvation diets, barely enough to keep them alive to do the work ordered by their Nazi captors. Many were used as live subjects for the experiments of ghoulish Nazi doctors.

Some were subjected to gradually increasing atmospheric pressure to see how Luftwaffe pilots would react in varying flight altitudes. Some were shot with poison gas pellets to see how long it would take for the deadly toxin to do its work. Some had their brains and other body organs "harvested" for comparative measurement. Twins were subjected to lobotomies to analyze if their reactions to various stimuli would medically differ. There are old pictures of amputated body parts in liquid preservatives, kept in inventory until needed for anatomical examination.

Thousands of inmates were shot, bludgeoned or gassed to death and their bodies disposed of in huge ovens. Clandestine pictures show piles of bodies ready for incineration. There are samples of actual steel oven doors from camps and reconstructions of converted truck chassis used as crude substitutes for carts which burial details used to carry bodies of dead fellow prisoners from the ovens.

There are detailed explanations of the process used to gas prisoners. Apparently, male and female inmates were first ordered into anterooms where they were stripped and then told to take delousing showers. They were told it was all in the interest of ensuring hygiene, a lie which the filthy prisoners willingly swallowed. Then they were led into a windowless adjoining room, all doors tightly locked and the deadly Zyklon gas fed into tubes punched into the sides of the room. All in the room were dead within minutes. Their bodies were often buried in common pits or burned in the ovens.

We learn that the rates of killings were usually dictated by the top echelons of the Nazi hierarchy. At one point, the quotas reach thousands a day at each of the concentration camps.

The last segment is entitled "The Final Chapter," covering the period of the deliverance of prisoners by victorious Allied troops, the mandatory tours of the camps by German citizens living in nearby towns and cities to force them to witness what they claimed to be ignorant of, and the Nuremberg trials of former Nazi concentration camp commanders and guards.

In stark contrast, we also learn of the courage and kindness of many citizens of Nazi-occupied countries who risked lives to hide Jews from German soldiers. Some of these kind souls were later captured and themselves sent to the camps. Others survived the war, but were unwilling to receive the thanks of the people they helped because, even in the areas "liberated" by the Allies, one who was known to have aided the Jews was not only harassed, he or she could be beaten and even killed.

The themes of the Museum are "Knowledge, Remembrance, Conscience." It is, of course, important to know. For many, like me, who were born after the Second World War, this story was not only a jarring education, it was a phase of human history which we cannot, unfortunately, say with certainty is over. Today you still read accounts of "ethnic cleansing," the modern equivalent of the genocide perpetrated by the Nazis.

I can understand why it is important for the families of the victims to remember. The walls and ceilings of connecting passageways of the exhibition floors are filled with pictures of Jewish communities and families taken before the Holocaust. They are familiar family portraits: whole families and individuals, babies and young children, new graduates and fresh retirees, newly-married couples and newly-inducted policemen and soldiers, bar mitzvahs and Passover feasts, wealthy professionals and hard-working peasants. These were people who had no idea of the horrors they were about to face.

But most of all, I think, the Holocaust Museum is about conscience. History is all-important because we must know how and why this all happened, and who is accountable, if we are to avoid a repetition of the past. We must make an informed and aware conscience possible, to make certain that the future of mankind does not see another Holocaust.

This is, as we have already seen in Croatia and Serbia, in Rwanda and Darfur, in Aceh and, to some extent, in Kashmir, probably too much to ask of mankind. But it is important to keep telling the story of the Holocaust. Perhaps, sometime in the future, when it isn’t too late yet, we will learn.

One of the uncomfortable aspects of the Holocaust, an aspect which at least has been openly confronted, if not finally resolved, is the role Catholics played in that event. From as early as the orientation film for the Museum, we are already told that one of the troubling questions raised is the role of the Church, principally the Vatican and past Popes themselves, in making the Holocaust possible.

Raising this question does not mean that the Vatican is charged with openly supporting harassment or intimidation, much less genocide, of the Jewish people. When Pope Pius XII, for instance, is called "Hitler’s Pope" in an explosive book by journalist John Cornwell, he does not charge the Pope with participation or complicity in the atrocities. Rather, he accuses the Pontiff of what one critic calls "moral myopia," of not doing enough when he could have, of an alleged inexcusable silence and timidity.

Other authors, such as David I. Kertzer in his book The Pope Against the Jews, argue that it is unfair to single out Pius XII. His attitudes simply reflected a historical anti-Jewish bias evident in previous Popes. Christians, it seems, both Catholic and Protestants, have spent centuries expressing this anti-Jewish bent which supposedly culminated in the Holocaust.

It is a complex, but nevertheless important, debate. The late John Paul II tried to resolve the controversy once and for all as far back as 1987. However, the resulting report of a Commission, issued in 1998, proved unsatisfactory.

We will need another column to explain this.