27th of January – Remembering Holocaust on Mozart’s 250th birthday

By: Hatto Fischer, Athens

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If Heritage Radio Network looks back over the past year many activities touched upon that what is not only to be remembered but dealt with as ongoing concern on how human issues are resolved so as to uphold human rights and further such actions as to safeguard human dignity. In the magazine “are museums just digging in the past”, HRN brings an interview with Historian and Archaeologist Hirte who has undertaken it to recover items from the rubbish of Buchenwald by Weimar, items like make shift tooth brushes, stamps etc. created by the then prisoners and which can tell a story about life in this concentration camp so close to the birthplace of German classics and the constitution of the Weimar Republic.

During the HERMES summer courses Pawel Kaminski, our HRN editor and contributor from Krakow spoke with an Auschwitz survivor and was deeply impressed by this man who called Auschwitz an university where he learned that the worst thing people can let happen is separation for afterwards ‘selection’ can begin. Selection meant then to be picked for the work camp instead of heading to certain death in the gas chamber. As of late it has been revealed that the German Bank was involved in the construction of Auschwitz while Jan Brueggemeier, coordinator of HRN followed the lead to discover who had built the gas ovens. The oddest contradiction in that account has been a Communist who worked for that company installing the ovens. Ideology and the need to work for a living seem hardly ever to go together but then Communism, in particular Stalin left also a legacy of camps behind and many millions who died as a result of that kind of political persecution out of insanity of power being so insecure as not able to hold things together except by the rule of fear.

Many things come to mind when looking at what Auschwitz stands for. The Holocaust exhibition at the Imperial War Museum held last July 2005 in London was a replica with a real freight train standing in one of the rooms while in another a model depicted the trains arriving in a special end station consisting only of ramps from where the prisoners were led of.

There is, however, more to Auschwitz and the Holocaust when beginning to read the documents left behind after the camps opened. The Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. is engaged in the pain staking process to verify every possible document. Out of these many puzzles and clues the pictures of what took place then develop themselves out of the questions we pose when reading these reports and when thinking of them while taking the autobahn passing by those forests in which some of them were kept for reasons of wishing to avoid detection from the air.

Since this year of remembrance coincides with Mozart’s 250th birthday, something should be said about the role of music. Carlos Fuentos in ‘Skin Exchange’ mentions that the Nazis considered it to be a good joke if the Jewish orchestra in Theresienstadt would play Verdi’s ‘Requiem’ before being led of to the trains heading for Auschwitz. Carlos Fuentos describes in his novel one German architect who had helped to construct Theresienstadt as the incarnation of what was then a prerequisite for the Holocaust, namely a vision but not for the future but one of self isolation. Fuentos called it the ‘vision of loneliness’. Translated into architecture, the buildings of Theresienstadt were designed in such a way that the people could not really go upgright and side by side down endless corridors but they separated and isolated people. It was so narrow that they had to pass through as a single file. Such is architecture that it can but also makes the separation of people into an act of anti solidarity with people.

Indeed, if Holocaust is a reason to remember something about the need for political awareness, then human solidarity with anyone exposed unfairly and unjustly to any abuse of power. That begins when parents hit an infant to stop the crying. There may be helplessness but also fear and more so there is the exasperation of that little creature does not accept any authority. This goes all the way to the absurd reason of war as demonstrated by Bush and Blair when they justified the invasion into Iraq in order to topple Saddam Hussein as the latter was deemed not to show sufficient respect of their authority. Bush and Blair wanted from him full compliance and total cooperation, both impossible demands for no one can be expected to give up fully freedom and self respect.

Resistance is something to be kept in mind for it runs throughout history and all societies for whenever power wishes to rule without being challenged, it will exaggerate this challenge into a threat and lash out accordingly. Elytis in his famous poem ‘Axion Esti’ describes how a German officer commands one man after another to step forth after they had been arrested as potential resisters to German occupation of Greece during Second World War, and when Manolis refuses, this officer shots him. Elytis says rightly so while life ends for this officer, that of Manolis has just begun.

That resistance was shown by countless Jewish people for they did not give in to their torturers and guards. The world has still to learn the meaning of that resistance. Everything else may be too many words for something which has no words. Silence is the message of Auschwitz, the silence of resistance against words being misused when turning to lies. As Adorno would say, the biggest danger comes when people not only lie, but convince themselves as if they are saying the truth. The way the Iranian president and others who deny the Holocaust resort to science to substantiate their lies is an interesting case but shows also how easily science can be transformed into a tool of ideology. We are still bypassing that subject matter or as Reid said the conscience of scientists has also been twisted and hurt ever since 1945 ended with the first nuclear bombs being dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That this problem is today connected in Iran striving for such a weapon while denying the Holocaust is, therefore, no coincidence. It is a rebuttal of Western ways of resolving contradictions while claiming only the Right to own contradictions, including the blending of the masses with the claim to wish only a strong own state. That rebuttal is linked to Chirac’s threat with nuclear weapons, is repeated by Merkel who endorses such a threat against any potential terrorist state and does not end with the debate about use of torture since apparently the threats are so great that a ‘dirty fight’ becomes justifiable. All that is no good omen on a day when more sober spirits would light a candle in silence and think of those brave people who died in silence and without experiencing solidarity from the rest of the world.