By: John Weigel
It was the many markers that made the deepest impression on me. On Friday, June 30th, our CWB tour group visited the former death camp of Birkenau and the concentration camp of Auschwitz I. At Birkenau, there is an abstract sculpture many yards long, located between the ruins of two sets of gas chambers and crematoria. In front of it lie perhaps two dozen bronze markers informing visitors that a million and a half people, mostly Jews, died at the camps while it was in operation. Each one was in a different language, whether Polish, Hebrew or Yiddish, Creek, Dutch, French, German, Norwegian or some other I could not recognize, though I’m sure Czech and Serbo-Croat were there. These were the tongues and homelands of the Jews forced to serve as raw material for the German murder industry.
This great diversity of languages suggested several things to me. First, it emphasized even more than maps and diagrams the huge geographic extent of the Holocaust. Every land under German or other Axis occupation was touched by terror and death. Second, only by concentrating and killing Europe’s Jews at Auschwitz could the Nazis create the international Jewish union of their hot imagination. Whereas live Jews were divided by nationality, party, class, sect, generation and gender, now they came together in a uniform fellowship of soot and ashes, a continent-wide conspiracy of disappearance. Finally, the markers suggested the Holocaust, which brought so many countries into a Germany-managed network of complicity and horror, as an evil forerunner of the European Union. This monument at Birkenau therefore implies one practical aspect of the slogan, “never again.” The EU project of peace through unity and prosperity must succeed despite the most determined attacks by ultranationalist rabble-rousers, because the alternative is peace and unity in a vast European grave.