I'd like to think that just about everyone has read the stories--and seen the pictures. They're perfectly awful, of course, but just about any description falls short--say, f0r instance, the line I just used. Listen: "pictures of the Holocaust--we've all seen them--are perfectly awful.
There's even a hint of an oxymoron there, two words most often and most likely thought of as opposites: perfect and awful. The oxymoron stretches the description into something almost poetic, something more than words--in this case--something worse than the words. It takes something more than words to describe the Holocaust. If, in point of fact, a picture is worth a thousand words, it's safe to say, I believe, that even pictures of the suffering are perfectly awful. What happened in the camps was worse--always, always, always worse.
Here's a picture of words scribbled down by a Jewish man from Poland named Zalman Grodowski, who was specially chosen as a sonderkommando, a man designated, under penalty of death, to help take people to their deaths.
No matter what you say or how you say it, it's just not enough. For the last several months, Union Station, Kansas City, has hosted an exhibition of Auschwitz artifacts that curators have assembled into a comprehensive retelling of the story of Auschwitz, perhaps the most famous of the camps because it was, almost from its inception, an factory designed for one purpose and one purpose only--to kill millions of undesirables. These men, these women, these children--
and this,
women like these, who've already lost their hair--
Death itself dreamed up in a place that would seem a wonderful historical building even if it hadn't hosted the ordinary men who sat down together and designed a place of death, a "death camp" that would kill a million people,
where men who worshipped at Christian churches--Protestant and Catholic, men who listened to Bach and Brahms and Beethoven and loved their wives and children, men who waved their national flag and were more than willing to give up their lives for Deutschland, where those men sat down together over coffee and looked over plans like this, drawn up by ordinary architects and draftsman in ironed shirts and pleated pants, other men who, after work, went home and enjoyed family dinners--
Men and women whose life's mission was described and defined by a man they worshipped, a hero, one of their own who cared about their troubles, their lives, and their souls, and showed them the way to the immensity of the task they faced:
Just in case you can't read the quote, let me make it perfectly clear, as clear as it was to the millions of Germans who determined it to be the truth:
There's even a hint of an oxymoron there, two words most often and most likely thought of as opposites: perfect and awful. The oxymoron stretches the description into something almost poetic, something more than words--in this case--something worse than the words. It takes something more than words to describe the Holocaust. If, in point of fact, a picture is worth a thousand words, it's safe to say, I believe, that even pictures of the suffering are perfectly awful. What happened in the camps was worse--always, always, always worse.
Here's a picture of words scribbled down by a Jewish man from Poland named Zalman Grodowski, who was specially chosen as a sonderkommando, a man designated, under penalty of death, to help take people to their deaths.
No matter what you say or how you say it, it's just not enough. For the last several months, Union Station, Kansas City, has hosted an exhibition of Auschwitz artifacts that curators have assembled into a comprehensive retelling of the story of Auschwitz, perhaps the most famous of the camps because it was, almost from its inception, an factory designed for one purpose and one purpose only--to kill millions of undesirables. These men, these women, these children--
and this,
women like these, who've already lost their hair--
Death itself dreamed up in a place that would seem a wonderful historical building even if it hadn't hosted the ordinary men who sat down together and designed a place of death, a "death camp" that would kill a million people,
where men who worshipped at Christian churches--Protestant and Catholic, men who listened to Bach and Brahms and Beethoven and loved their wives and children, men who waved their national flag and were more than willing to give up their lives for Deutschland, where those men sat down together over coffee and looked over plans like this, drawn up by ordinary architects and draftsman in ironed shirts and pleated pants, other men who, after work, went home and enjoyed family dinners--
Men and women whose life's mission was described and defined by a man they worshipped, a hero, one of their own who cared about their troubles, their lives, and their souls, and showed them the way to the immensity of the task they faced:
Just in case you can't read the quote, let me make it perfectly clear, as clear as it was to the millions of Germans who determined it to be the truth:
Here in the East spiritually unbridgeable conceptions are fighting each other: German sense of honor and race, against an Asiatic mode of thinking and primitive instincts. We clearly recognize our mission to save European culture from the advancing Asiatic barbarism. This battle can only end with the destruction of one or the other.
Perfectly awful.
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