I visited Auschwitz. I hired a guide, a member of the museum staff, who led me through the complex for 4 hours. His explanations of the context and meaning of the relics I was seeing were invaluable.
It was a deeply moving experience. Years later, I still do not have adequate words to describe what I felt then, and how it changed me forever.
One anecdote: After walking for several hours, I noticed a few places where the soil had been disturbed, mostly for conservation of a building or for landscaping. The mounds of fresh earth were flecked with tiny white dots. I asked my guide about them.
"Pick up a handful of dirt, and look at it closely," he told me. I did. I saw that the flecks were in fact irregularly shaped fragments, some long and thin, others short or nearly cubical. I looked at him in puzzlement.
"They are human bone fragments. At first, the Nazis ground up the bones left from the crematoriums, and took them and the ashes to the river for dumping. But as time went on, the river bank where they dumped became fouled and dangerous, and the pace of the cremations increased, so they just spread them over the compound after having prisoners pound the bones into small bits. Everywhere you have walked today is covered with these fragments to a depth of a 10 cm or more."
The horror of that handful is still burned into my brain. I felt sick.
The total number of people killed at Auschwitz is estimated by the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum at 1.1 million, about 90% of whom were Jews from almost every country in Europe. Most victims were killed in Auschwitz II's gas chambers using Zyklon B; other deaths were caused by systematic starvation, forced labor, lack of disease control, individual executions, and purported "medical experiments".
Auschwitz concentration campOver at
Just Foreign Policy they keep a running total of the number of Iraq deaths since the US invasion in 2003. The methods are based on scientific studies, such as the
one published in the Lancet. Few questions the results when applied to Darfur, or Bosnia, or to death tolls in natural disasters. But the chickenhawks who endlessly beat the war drums are furious at this study because they don't like the answers.
I don't like the answers either, but I can't refute them. Today's estimate of the death toll in Iraq is 1,339,771. That's 22% higher than Auschwitz. The victims of Auschwitz were drawn from pretty much all of Europe, with a population vastly greater than 30-odd million souls in Iraq. Roughly 4% of the nation has been slaughtered.
This doesn't count the killing in Afghanistan, Pakistan, or other theaters. In just this one war, the US government has murdered more people than the Germans managed to kill at Auschwitz.
God help us all. If there is any hope of salvation for us, it comes from mercy, not justice.
Peace,
Silver
