CW: this is a post about the Holocaust, it will not be a pleasant read.
It's a cliche to say that the further the the Second World War recedes in to the haze of the past the harder it is to convey to a modern generation the extent of the perverted hellishness of the Holocaust.
Maybe that's a positive thing, that most people alive today cannot perceive the privation and depravity of those times. Or maybe it's a danger because if even then many people refused to believe that such events happened, how do we preserve the memory of the Holocaust today and in the years to come?
There is a compartment in my mind full of horrific details from a lifetime of hearing the stories of survivors and reading primary accounts. Mind and soulbreaking memoirs that once read cannot be unread. Personal testimonies told in hushed tones by little old ladies and shrunken old men who in their distant youth experienced and witnessed the unthinkable, not just with their own eyes and ears, but on their own flesh.
My grandmother-in-law describing how the Nazis discovered the Polish farmhouse where she was hiding, she and her mother fleeing in to the night, feet pounding through the forest, praying not to trip, her mother beseeching her to go on ahead because she was younger, faster. And she reluctantly obeyed, the gap between them widening, as minutes later hearing shots, a cry and a thud, in the distance the baying of search hounds and voices in German.
And she knew that thud was her mother being shot, that she would never see her again, fighting with every nerve and sinew to just keep running, not to turn round, not to stop, not to go back to her dying mother, knowing the Nazis would soon be upon her wounded mother, but that this distraction was the only thing that might give her the chance to get far enough away and survive.
My childhood rabbi, the first army chaplain to arrive with Allied forces to liberate Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, finding himself standing in a sea of walking corpses, the dead piled up like firewood or lying where they fell. Battle hardened Allied soldiers falling to their knees in shock, struck dumb by the diabolical scene all around them, passing out from the stench of death, sickness and feces that permeated the place. Even as their minds tried to comprehend what they were seeing some emaciated camp inmates collapsed and died before their eyes.
Today so often talking about the Holocaust is all so sanitised. Ask someone what the Holocaust was and if they know they will likely say 6 million Jews were killed in gas chambers, which obviously isn't entirely accurate, but on the surface of it, conveys at least some understanding of what happened.
Ask them what they mean about gassing though and they will probably imagine some kind of poison gas cloud almost gently knocking out its victims as it killed them, the image becomes almost sickly "humane" as a method of execution. What most people fail to realise is the extent to which Zyklon B killed in a far more horrific manner.
The Nazis liked using Zyklon B gas because it left little visible evidence on the corpses, allowing the perpetrators to continue the lie that this was "humane fumigation" of people they considered to be vermin. We believe that today we are so hyper aware of mental health issues, but the Nazis were too. They didn't want to traumatise their death squads. As much as the illusion of "fumigation" and "showers" was there to make the victims more docile about going to their deaths, it was also there to make the task easier for the executioners themselves. Simpler for them too to maintain a facade of rounding up the Jewish "filth" to be sanitised and cleansed, herd them in to a room and let the gas do its work, neat and tidy hands free murder with squads of slave labour to clean up the resulting "mess".
The truth is that death from Zyklon B is agonising torture, far from any kind of peaceful passing from the world, most people taking minutes to die as the gas painfully, slowly, broke down its victims.
But the Nazis preffered Zyklon B because they didn't want to traumatise their personnel with overly grotesque deaths. Even so, members of the sonderkommando, the slave labour forced to clear the bodies from the gas chamber, described the dead with blood seeping from their ears, some frothing at the mouth, others with corpses covered in red spots or bruises as they struggled to cling on to life until the last moment.
Even in the gassing murder trucks used for some executions, the Nazis trained their drivers to pack in the victims to the gassing chamber and drive just so that most of the condemned passed out from suffocation or the motion of the truck, allowing minimal use of the carbon monoxide employed in the mobile gas chambers, which left blue and messy corpses having lost control of their bodily functions.
And this is just the very tip of the tip of the iceberg of eye witness accounts, snippets that are usually locked up tight somewhere in the back of my memory because they are too awful to bring out in to the light.
I wonder if without rubbing our faces in the gruesome details though we are all in danger of being unable to keep that memory of the Holocaust real. Already Nazi and Holocaust have become pat phrases to throw around our political discourse at anyone whose politics we suspect of being problematic. Every lightly flung Hitler and fascist comment hurled at a political opponent diminishes the true memory of what the Holocaust was, the enormity of it, the extent of this mammoth centrally planned and bureaucratic killing machine.
Our world has known many murderous dictators, but even Stalin's homicidal rule and Pol Pot's killing fields were in a different league to the state regulated mass murder infrastructure of Nazi Germany, with its meticulous records, complicit industrial complex, precision technology and punctual railways. There have been many crimes against humanity, but sheer organisation and planning of this specific crime against humanity stands out in its heinousness because this was no incidental war crime or spontaneous massacre but to an extent the raison d'etre for much of the Nazi war machine.
It feels sick to talk of these things, the extent of the degradation and pain suffered by the 6 Million as they went to their deaths, the technical details of how Zyklon B gas killed. But how can we not?
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