Out
of Auschwitz |
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By Samuel Pisar | |
Friday, January 29, 2009 | |
Paris | |
SIXTY-FIVE years ago this week, the Soviets liberated Auschwitz, while
the Americans were approaching Dachau. For a survivor of these two infernos
to still be alive and well, with a new family that has resurrected for
me the one I had lost, seems almost unreal. When I entered Adolf Eichmann
and Josef Mengele’s gruesome universe at the age of 13, I measured my
life expectancy in days, weeks at the most. |
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In
the early winter of 1944, World War II was coming to an end. But we in
the camps knew nothing. We wondered: What is happening in the world outside?
Where is God? Where is the pope? Does anyone out there know what is happening
here to us? Does anyone even care? |
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Russia was devastated. Britain had its back against
the wall. And America? It was so far away, so divided. How could it be
expected to save civilization from the seemingly invincible forces of
darkness? |
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It took a long time for the news of the American-led
invasion of Normandy to slip into Auschwitz. There were also rumors that
the Red Army was advancing quickly on the eastern front. With the ground
shrinking under their feet, the Nazis were becoming palpably nervous.
The gas chambers spewed fire and smoke as never before. |
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One
gray, frosty morning, our guards ordered those of us still capable of
slave labor to line up and marched us out of the camp. We were to be shunted
westward, from Poland into Germany. I was beside myself with excitement
— and dread. Salvation somehow seemed closer — yet we also knew that we
could be killed at any moment. The goal was to hang on a little longer.
I was almost 16 now, and I wanted to live. |
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We
marched from camp to camp, day and night, until we and our torturers began
to hear distant explosions that sounded like artillery fire. One afternoon
we were strafed by a squadron of Allied fighter planes that mistook our
column for Wehrmacht troops. As the Germans hit the dirt, their machine
guns blazing in all directions, someone near me yelled, “Run for it!”
I kicked off my wooden clogs and sprinted into the forest. There I hid,
hungry and cold, for weeks, until I was discovered by a group of American
soldiers. The boys who brought me life were not much older than I. They
fed me, clothed me, made me a mascot of their regiment and gave me my
first real taste of freedom. |
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Today,
the last living survivors of the Holocaust are disappearing one by one.
Soon, history will speak about Auschwitz with the impersonal voice of
researchers and novelists at best, and at worst in the malevolent register
of revisionists and falsifiers who call the Nazi Final Solution a myth.
This process has already begun. |
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And
it is why those of us who survived have a duty to transmit to humankind
the memory of what we endured in body and soul, to tell our children that
the fanaticism and violence that nearly destroyed our universe have the
power to enflame theirs, too. The fury of the Haitian earthquake, which
has taken more than 200,000 lives, teaches us how cruel nature can be
to man. The Holocaust, which destroyed a people, teaches us that nature,
even in its cruelest moments, is benign in comparison with man when he
loses his moral compass and his reason. |
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After
so much death, a groundswell of compassion and solidarity for victims
— all victims, whether from natural disasters, racial hatred, religious
intolerance or terrorism — occasionally manifests itself, as it has in
recent days. |
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These
actions stand in contrast to those moments when we have failed to act;
they remind us, on this dark anniversary, of how often we remain divided
and confused, how in the face of horror we hesitate, vacillate, like sleepwalkers
at the edge of the abyss. Of course, they remind us, too, that we have
managed to stave off the irrevocable; that our chances for living in harmony
are, thankfully, still intact. |
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Comment: |
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This is another one that I feel uncomfortable in making any observations: but leave it to people like Pisar, who is not sleepwalking. | |