We dare not forget

Seventy-five years ago Auschwitz was revealed to the world.

Nearly twenty years ago, on a gray day, a chill mist dampening the rusting rails and silent stones, I walked the path that was at the end of a million lives.

On this anniversary, that experience bears remembering.

— Jerome

There was a sense of the world, ever so slightly, being set aright.

They tumbled out of their buses with the puppyish exuberance of overexcited fourteen-year-olds anywhere. Roughhousing, squealing, they struck poses for the camera, unfurling their blue and white banners with gleeful indifference to the rusting barbed wire stretching into the distance behind them.

They were the children — no — the grandchildren, the great-grandchildren of the Final Solution, Israeli teenagers triumphantly waving the Star of David flag over the killing grounds at Auschwitz.

If the gates of Hell ever opened on earth, this could well be the place. The very name carries the sound of death — Auschwitz. A place captured in grainy, black and white.

Black-clad troopers.

White, naked flesh of uncounted corpses.

Greasy black smoke fueled by white fat drifting down on the thousands waiting to die.

That place is gone now.

But, there’s a hint of it.

Beyond the arched brick watchtower, the October wind was sharp and chill, whipped unobstructed across acres and acres of flat silent ground through the spiked wire, across cold, steel rails, stirring the dry grass along the rail siding that carried the boxcars that carried the children and the parents to within sight and sound and smell of the massive crematoria that lie in unmourned ruins. The wind blows through silent barracks, no longer carrying the fetid stench of death, excrement and thousands of unwashed bodies.

Much is gone, but not all.

In a guilty orgy of fire and explosion, the murderers did what they could to wipe the evidence of what they had done from the face of the earth.

But they stand convicted by what they failed to destroy.

Bottom of Form

... a mountain of shoes.

... great drifts of hair, shorn to stuff mattresses.

... heaps of suitcases, eyeglasses, prayer shawls,

... and corpses.

And the thousands who were meant to be corpses, who lived and remembered and told their stories so we might never forget.

Then restarted their lives — mourning aunts, brothers, the cranky old lady who lived next door. They restarted families, breathed new life into old tradition so that their children, their grandchildren, their great-grandchildren could return to Auschwitz.

On a school field trip.

Carrying blue and white banners, exuberant in life, triumphant over death, nudging the gates of Hell closed just a little bit tighter.

Ever so slightly, setting the world back aright.