The encyclopedic overview of World War II was the subject of "Hitler's Europe," my freshman year history course at Binghamton University. I was motivated to take it by feelings too complex to parse: Most of my friends at school were Jewish, some with older family members who had been in — or died in — the camps. My father's family hailed from a small town in eastern Germany, though both he and his parents were born in the United States.
The class was strangely brutal while at the same time also boring. Boring because we students lacked not only historical context, but even a way of understanding the importance of history itself, apart from our lukewarm high school training in American history. We were simply too young to comprehend the breadth of the war.
And it was brutal for all the reasons you can imagine. Our weekly movie screenings included the de Sica films "The Garden of the Finzi-Continis," about the Nazi occupation of Italy and the persecution of Italian Jews, and "Two Women," about the rape of a mother and daughter by mercenaries fighting for free France. We watched the Czech film "The Shop on Main Street," about the Aryanization of a small business and a resulting suicide. We saw Leni Riefenstahl's Nazi propaganda film "Triumph of the Will" and Alain Resnais' heartbreaking half-hour documentary on the death camps, "Night and Fog."
"Hitler's Europe" so imprinted on me that throughout my life I return again and again to read books about the war, trying to fathom that which always exceeds my grasp: the nature of systematic and institutionalized violence and cruelty. And so, in the midst of reading Erik Larson's "In the Garden of Beasts," about the United States' ambassador's time in Berlin during Hitler's first years as chancellor, I plucked off my bookshelf Lawrence Rees' "Auschwitz: A New History."
To read these books simultaneously is to see the schizophrenic progression from a culturally rich society with burgeoning nationalistic and anti-Semitic leanings into a "fatherland"-obsessed nation at war as much with other countries as with the Jews and minorities within its own country and those it conquered. The machinations and organization of systematic murder that grows between 1934 and 1943 beggars — and burdens — the imagination.
As it happens, I didn't know I was reading "Auschwitz: A New History" on the cusp of the 75th anniversary of Auschwitz's liberation by the Red Army, and so one of the weirder coincidences has been to hear of the controversy surrounding the international observation of the anniversary.
Tension between Israel, Poland and Russia have led to invitations offered and rescinded, blame and gamesmanship in prime time and a guest list of European representatives that is woefully incomplete.
And the global hope of Auschwitz's "never again" message seems undercut by the lack of representation by non-European countries that have conducted their own genocides and human rights abuses. No representatives were sent from Rwanda, from Myanmar, from Sudan, from China. No Arab countries sent representatives, while senior officials from Bosnia, Serbia and Croatia attended with hesitation.
The irony is unmistakable, but tragic: For all our raised concerns about increasing anti-Semitism, such checkered support of this 75th anniversary suggests countries are unable to set aside political differences in combating it.
The final lines of "Night and Fog" speak to this reality perhaps even more powerfully than they did when the film was made in 1955, 10 years after the camp's liberation.
As a camera pans the abandoned, haunted grounds of Auschwitz, the French voiceover speaks these words:
We pretend to take up hope again as the image recedes into the past,
as if we were cured once and for all of the scourge of the camps.
We pretend it all happened only once, at a given time and place.
We turn a blind eye to what surrounds us, and a deaf ear to humanity's never-ending cry.
But we must not let that be so.
Jo Page is a writer and Lutheran minister. Her email is jopage34@yahoo.com. Her website is at https://www.jograepage.com.
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Commentary: A warning: The horrors of the Holocaust can occur again - Albany Times Union
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