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Auschwitz survivor: Do we still have ears to listen?

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  • Auschwitz survivor: Do we still have ears to listen?

    Houston Chronicle, TX
    Jan 26 2005

    Auschwitz survivor: Do we still have ears to listen?
    Take the moment to renew the vow 'never forget'
    By SAMUEL PISAR


    Sixty years ago, the Russians liberated Auschwitz, as the Americans
    approached Dachau. The Allied advance revealed to a stunned world the
    horrors of the greatest catastrophe ever to befall our civilization.
    To a survivor of both death factories, where Hitler's gruesome
    reality eclipsed Dante's imaginary inferno, being alive and well so
    many years later feels unreal.

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    We the survivors are now disappearing one by one. Soon history will
    speak of Auschwitz at best with the impersonal voice of researchers
    and novelists, at worst with the malevolence of demagogues and
    falsifiers. This week the last of us, with a multitude of heads of
    state and other dignitaries, are gathering at that cursed site to
    remind the world that past can be prologue, that the mountains of
    human ashes dispersed there are a warning to humanity of what may
    still lie ahead.

    The genocides in Armenia, Cambodia, Bosnia, Kosovo and Rwanda and the
    recent massacres of innocents in the United States, Spain, Israel,
    Indonesia and so many other countries have demonstrated our inability
    to learn from the blood-soaked past. Auschwitz, the symbol of
    absolute evil, is not only about that past, it is about the present
    and the future of our newly enflamed world, where a coupling of
    murderous ideologues and means of mass destruction can trigger new
    catastrophes.

    When the ghetto liquidation in Bialystok, Poland, began, only three
    members of our family were still alive: my mother, my little sister
    and I, age 13. Father had already been executed by the Gestapo.
    Mother told me to put on long pants, hoping I would look more like a
    man, capable of slave labor. "And you and Frieda?" I asked. She
    didn't answer. She knew that their fate was sealed. As they were
    chased, with the other women, the children, the old and the sick,
    toward the waiting cattle cars, I could not take my eyes off them.
    Little Frieda held my mother with one hand, and with the other, her
    favorite doll. They looked at me too, before disappearing from my
    life forever.

    Their train went directly to Auschwitz-Birkenau, mine to the
    extermination camp of Majdanek. Months later, I also landed in
    Auschwitz, still hoping naively to find their trace. When the SS
    guards, with their dogs and whips, unsealed my cattle car, many of my
    comrades were already dead from hunger, thirst and lack of air. At
    the central ramp, surrounded by electrically charged barbed wire, we
    were ordered to strip naked and file past the infamous Dr. Josef
    Mengele. The "angel of death" performed on us his ritual "selection"
    - those who were to die immediately, to the right, those destined to
    live a little longer and undergo other atrocious medical experiments,
    to the left.

    In the background there was music. At the main gate, with its
    sinister slogan "Work Brings Freedom," sat, dressed in striped prison
    rags like mine, one of the most remarkable orchestras ever assembled.
    It was made up of virtuosos from Warsaw and Paris, Kiev and
    Amsterdam, Rome and Budapest. To accompany the selections, hangings
    and shootings while the gas chambers and crematoria belched smoke and
    fire, these gentle musicians were forced to play Bach, Schubert and
    Mozart, interspersed with marches to the glory of the Fuhrer.

    In the summer of 1944, the Third Reich was on the verge of collapse,
    yet Berlin's most urgent priority was to accelerate the "final
    solution." The death toll in the gas chambers on D-Day, as on any
    other day, far surpassed the enormous Allied losses suffered on the
    beaches of Normandy.

    My labor commando was assigned to remove garbage from a ramp near the
    crematoria. From there I observed the peak of human extermination and
    heard the blood-curdling cries of innocents as they were herded into
    the gas chambers. Once the doors were locked, they had only three
    minutes to live, yet they found enough strength to dig their
    fingernails into the walls and scratch in the words "Never Forget."

    Have we already forgotten?

    I also witnessed an extraordinary act of heroism. The Sonderkommando
    - inmates coerced to dispose of bodies - attacked their SS guards,
    threw them into the furnaces, set fire to buildings and escaped. They
    were rapidly captured and executed, but their courage boosted our
    morale.

    As the Russians advanced, those of us still able to work were
    evacuated deep into Germany. My misery continued at Dachau. During a
    final death march, while our column was being strafed by Allied
    planes that mistook us for Wehrmacht troops, I escaped with a few
    others. An armored battalion of GIs brought me life and freedom. I
    had just turned 16 - a skeletal "subhuman" with shaved head and
    sunken eyes who had been trying so long to hold on to a flicker of
    hope. "God bless America," I shouted uncontrollably .

    In the autumn of their lives, the survivors of Auschwitz feel a
    visceral need to transmit what we have endured, to warn younger
    generations that today's intolerance, fanaticism and hatred can
    destroy their world as they once destroyed ours, that powerful alert
    systems must be built not only against the fury of nature - a tsunami
    or storm or eruption - but above all against the folly of man.
    Because we know from bitter experience that the human animal is
    capable of the worst, as well as the best - of madness as of genius -
    and that the unthinkable remainspossible.

    In the wake of so many recent tragedies, a wave of compassion and
    solidarity for the victims, a fragile yearning for peace, democracy
    and liberty, seem to be spreading around the planet. It is far too
    early to evaluate their potential. Mankind, divided and confused,
    still hesitates and vacillates. But the irrevocable has not yet
    happened; our chances are still intact. Pray that we learn how to
    seize them.

    Pisar is an international lawyer and the author of "Of Blood and
    Hope."
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