Every Day, All Day Humiliation at Auschwitz

 

Auschwitz-Birkenau latrine

On my return visit Auschwitz in July of this year, I saw things I missed or forgot I saw on my first visit in 2017.  

In 2017 I was overwhelmed by the scale of the camp--so many people murdered, so many German soldiers and civilians running the camp.  

One of the horrible sights was the latrine in a barracks at Birkenau.  The guards herded the inmates to the latrine. They used the latrine together, dozens at a time. The guards used a stopwatch.  When time was up, the inmate had to get up or be beaten.  

When I try to imagine how horrible life truly was I think of times when I lived and worked in close quarters large groups of men--the Army and Teamsters loading docks.  One lament common to both places was, "Can't I take a shit in peace?"  

No one wants to be rushed in a latrine.  

And even men I have known who care little for privacy would occasionally want "to shit in a latrine with a door."

When I was on German gunnery ranges in the 1970s, some of the ranges had a place we called a "Make A Buddy" Shitter.  It was an outhouse with two boards with three holes connected by a narrow floor space.  When it was full, three men sat on each side facing each other with interlaced knees.  The inside guys had to wait until the outside guys were done to get out.  Sometimes men would wear their gas masks to use that latrine.  

And yet, these laments of dock workers and soldiers hardly touch the deep humiliation of prisoners in Auschwitz and other concentration camps forced to use latrines on a stop watch.  

The Nazis who marched in Charlottesville represent the very same things as the guards at Auschwitz. They see me and everyone who is not in their tribe as less than human. Nazis are never "fine people." We can never have peace with a government that tolerates Nazis. We are fortunate to be delivered from a government that numbers all American Nazis among its voters.

Nazi and rebel flags together at Charlottesville, 

both flags represent the losers in racist wars.

 

Visiting Auschwitz Again It Is Even More Horrible

 

Auschwitz I

The second death camp I visited on this trip was the Auschwitz concentration camp. I was here in 2017. It was the first death camp I had ever visited. In fact, before that Auschwitz visit, I had never been to a Holocaust museum. 

The Nazi lie at the gate of every death camp

On this second visit I was more aware of the terrible scale of the slaughter and of the
camp itself. Auschwitz began as a Polish army camp taken over by the Nazis shortly after their victory in 1939. The camp is on the edge of the small city of Oswiecim. 

The little Polish town of Oswiecim became the center of death as Auschwitz-Birkenau

To Nazis expanded the camp by using slave labor to add second stories to existing barracks and added other buildings. The brick construction in Auschwitz is still solid today, unlike in many camps where wooden and hastily built brick buildings have long since fallen or crumbled. As Auschwitz became the center of Nazi genocide, the huge Birkenau camp was built two kilometers away. Acres of barracks and workshops cover a large field just outside the town of Oswiecim. 

The vast facility at Birkenau was where most Jews were murdered

In between acres of barracks is the rail siding where Jews were unloaded from box cars and separated to either work as slaves or be immediately killed by gas. Cliff and I walked for hours between and in the two camps trying to take in the full scale of place where more than million Jews were murdered.

Life or immediate death at the whim of a malignant Nazi

My Summer Vacation: More Concentration Camps

Arbeit macht frei the ironic and terrible sign at the gate 

of Auschwitz and other Nazi Concentration Camps

Next week I am flying to Germany to join my best friend Cliff on a thousand-mile tour of Nazi Concentration Camps.  We have visited other concentration camps together in 2017, 2019 and 2020:  Buchenwald, Dachau, and the first concentration camp opened in the state of Hesse in February1933.

We also visited Nuremberg in 2020, the site of the rallies that were central to Hitler's power. 

In July we will visit Flossenburg, Auschwitz-Birkenau and Theresienstadt.   We chose these because Cliff had never been Auschwitz, I had never been to Flossenberg and neither of us have been to Theresienstadt. 

Auschwitz is the largest and worst of  the camps. A million Jews died Auschwitz, but by the time the camp was in operation, three million Jews had already been murdered. They were shot by tens of thousands of German soldiers, German police, and by police and volunteers in conquered countries.   

Flossenburg is where Dietrich Bonhoeffer was martyred by the Nazis just before the war ended. One of the worst Trump toadies wrote a biography of Bonhoeffer in 2011.  Eric Metaxas could write about a martyr and then praise Trump.  

Thereseienstadt in the Czech Republic was the "show camp" for the Nazis early in the war. It was a place they took the Red Cross to show them the camps were not as bad as the rumors. It was also the camp where Jews who were confessing Christians were sent.  Churches in Germany stood aside and let their members who had any Jewish heritage be murdered.  

Bruder Timotheus and Kanaan 

Cliff was Sergeant Cliff Almes in the1970s in Cold War Germany where we were roommates.  After leaving the U.S. military he became Bruder Timotheus at the Land of Kanaan in Darmstadt. Kanaan was founded in 1947 by two women who believed Germany must repent for the Holocaust.

Before 2017, I had never been to a Holocaust museum or memorial or a concentration camp.  But when a racist President put the head breitbart.com in the White House, I knew I had to get connected to my genetic heritage.  Steve Bannon gave white supremacists and neo-Nazis a place to promote hate on breitbart.com  

In August 2017, Nazis were "fine people" according to the President and I needed to learn more about the hateful people who are his base of support.  

Germany was a civilized, if impoverished, country in 1932. By 1945, the country was bombed, invaded and defeated. The Nazis killed millions of innocent people and left their own country a smoldering ruin.  America was the leading democracy in the world in 2016, we are now slowly sinking into tyranny while Republicans cheer. 

I am going to concentration camps to see just how bad it can get if a tyrant rips away American democracy.