Tourist buses outside the gate at Auschwitz ii – Birkenau. Photo by Eric Francis.

[Editor's Note: This article was originally published Oct. 13, 2006. For a more detailed introduction to this series, please see this link. This is the last edition of the original series. Please watch for one additional installment by Eric this week. Thank you all for your thoughtful comments and letters about this series.]

NATIONALISM, WHICH IS a refined form of tribalism turned into a dangerous drug, is a frightening business, and one which we must grow out of if we are to become a peaceful global entity. Yes, we love our country, and we love our flag — or maybe the vote is out on that … maybe some of us in the US of A are mature enough to see that this nation is not always right, and as much as we love the flag we wince when we see it now, knowing what it represents. Will that get us kicked out of the tribe? Or worse — shot at dawn?

There is a lie at the base of nationalism that is too often misused by the powerful — that we’re better than everyone else. Everyone outside of our big national tent is just a “stranger,” not to be trusted; in a nation formed by an amalgam of immigrants, that’s not been an effortless sell … but the spin on 9/11 swept us away. We’re us — they’re them. Where it gets dicey is when there is perceived threat. It is then that we’re called upon to sacrifice [rights, liberties, individualism, treasure, moral judgment, dissent] to the state in order to empower it against that which threatens it. The National Socialists used such mythology to drive their own to blindness, and ultimately, madness. Interestingly, both Germany in the 30′s and America in the last few years have entered into such a situation without an actual, a specific, enemy.

The mood of mainstream Germany had been ploughed by years of circumstance — a growing decadence that alarmed the straight-laced, the loss of a world war, long periods of economic scarcity — so that a heavy-handed maniac like Hitler could produce an instant harvest when he planted a few lies into that fertile national soil. The Big Lie was easy enough for a defeated and deflated public to buy … we are superior and I will lead you to the greatness you deserve.

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Amalia, Sept. 27, 2006. Photo by Eric Francis.

[Editor's Note: This article was originally published Oct. 12, 2006. For a more detailed introduction to this series, please see this link. The approximately eight articles and 15 photos in this series will be published evenings at about 6 pm Eastern Time.]

AUSCHWITZ WAS just part of my trip to Poland, a beautifully alive country. I think Krakow may have been the most pleasant, vital city I’ve ever visited in Europe. The great thing about it from my viewpoint is that you can basically talk to anyone; they are for the most part curious and friendly people.

Through much of western Europe and England I find that people look down at the ground when they walk, or they walk past you like a horse wearing blinders staring straight ahead. In Poland I saw a lot of eyes looking back at me.

What I’ll remember from my trip to Auschwitz – Birkenau are the young people I met there. One thing everyone who gets to that horrendous place has in common is that they’re willing to face the truth. Whether it’s for curiosity, to observe the tragedy or to pay respects to ancestors, the willingness is the same. Every day, thousands of people come there seeking the truth. It is like a temple to reality; a place where denial is suspended.

Two students I met there stand out in memory. One was a guy named Robert, who I met when I cozied up with the group from Norway and Sweden, and sat down on the lawn outside gas chamber/crematorium #2.В  I was half expecting the usual reaction of mild hostility when you tag along with someone else’s tour group — nothing of the kind; I was welcomed.

Someone in the group asked about this in-ground, concrete pool of water that was standing next to the train tracks as you came into the camp.

Leonard (pictured earlier this week), who was giving the presentation, said, well, it’s like this. The Nazis wanted to insure their facility, and the insurance company required them to have a little reservoir in case they needed to fight a fire.

Robert turned to me and said, “Isn’t that sick? They took out an insurance policy on a death camp.”

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Photo Above: Young students make their mark in the Earth beside human ash pit, Auschwitz ii -Birkenau, Sept. 27, 2006. Photo by Eric Francis.

[Editor's Note: This article was originally published Oct. 11, 2006. For a more detailed introduction to this series, please see this link. The approximately eight articles and 15 photos in this series will be published evenings at about 6 pm Eastern Time. Our apologies for the late posting tonight.]

BEFORE we wrap up this photo and essay series on Auschwitz, we need to discuss the Big Lie. Everyone who is literate and concerned about the world needs to understand what this historical reference is. It is about something specific, and relevant today.

The Big Lie was a propaganda technique — more like psychological warfare — used on the German people so they would fall for the crime we now call the Holocaust. This involved their government and military murdering more than 12 million people in death camps, half of them Jews, and nearly all the Sinti and Romany people, along with waging open war on Europe and England for many years. That is to say, bombing great swaths of Europe, people and all, level to the ground.

We can all agree from the ash pit, depicted above, where hundreds of thousands of human lives were thrown, that the Holocaust was a crime. We must not lose sight of that in discussing how that crime was committed. We need to hold two thoughts at once: the ash pit, and the technique.

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[Editor's Note: This article was originally published Oct. 10, 2006. For a more detailed introduction to this series, please see this link. The approximately eight articles and 15 photos in this series will be published evenings at about 6 pm Eastern Time.]

View of Birkenau. Posted without comment, except for this excerpt from Adrienne Rich:

I came to explore the wreck.

The words are purposes.

The words are maps.

I came to see the damage that was done

and the treasures that prevail.

I stroke the beam of my lamp

slowly along the flank

of something more permanent

than fish or weed

the thing I came for: Continue Reading »

Originally published Oct. 9, 2006.

THE GUY in the photo above is called Leonard.

He is a minister who brings groups of kids to Auschwitz a few times a year from Norway and Sweden. There were a lot of students there the day I went, and I trust that this is pretty much true most days. For some reason, most of the students I met at Auschwitz and in Krakow were from the progressive democratic countries in northern Europe, who have made the connection between dignity, freedom and keeping the world safe from another disaster like this.

Here, in a very straightforward way, he is explaining to these students that they are in front of the ruins of gas chamber/crematorium 2, and what that means. This is at Auschwitz ii – Birkenau, the extended camp, the extermination complex. About 50 teenagers are listening attentively as he speaks. Beside us is another group going on in French. I understand enough French to know that the teacher is putting it to the students a little at a time, very tactfully, but getting the basic facts across.

Here, day after day, crowds of 1,000 or more people, most of them newly arrived by train, would go downstairs to undressing rooms, remove their clothes, and go upstairs to the “showers.” They had been instructed to fold their clothes neatly and remember exactly where they left them, so they’d be able to find them when they came back. Then, together with their families and the people they had traveled with, they would be gassed to death. The chamber would be left sealed for about half an hour to make sure nobody was missed (which didn’t always work).

Bodies, alive or dead, were then taken in carts on little tracks to the crematoria and incinerated in ovens up to three at a time. The ashes would be dumped in pits that are still there, where you can still find bits of bone in the nearby topsoil — direct evidence of what happened. The reason the buildings are in ruins is because the elite Nazi SS men, who ran the camp system, dynamited them just before the camp was liberated, in order to hide the evidence of their crimes against humanity. That kind of gesture is seen more of an admission of knowing it was wrong.

From 70% to 75% of the new arrivals at Auschwitz ii – Birkenau were killed immediately. The rest, the strongest among them, were allowed to live for about a month, and do their part in the German war effort, whether it was forced labor or taking part in “scientific” experimentation. We need to pause and remember that these survivors lived out their short lives knowing that the rest of their families, with whom they arrived, had gone to the ovens.

Toward the end of the war, there was a rubber factory called Auschwitz iii – Monowitz that used prisoners in an industrial setting; a concentration camp combined with a factory. This served for the Buna-Werke factory of the IG Farben concern*. There were many of these. We need to add slave labor to the list of Nazi atrocities.

Leonard explained about a place at the camp called Canada, which was where everyone’s baggage was sent, and there, sorted through for valuables (most of which were put into to the war effort). Many of the suitcases had some food in them. So the camp inmates who worked at Canada were the well-fed ones, as opposed to those who survived their remaining month of life on bread, margarine, and broth made from rotten vegetables.

Apparently, those in Auschwitz considered the nation of Canada to be their idea of the safest haven in the world. So the part of the camp where you would actually get to eat and do reasonable work was named for their utopia.

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Visitors to Auschwitz listen to the words of a tour guide with suitable expressions of disgust. I’ve tried enlarging the eyes of the guy with with sunglasses, and I can’t discern whether he is leering at me for taking his photo, or looking straight ahead. Photo by Eric Francis.

[Editor's Note: This article was originally published Oct. 8, 2006. For a more detailed introduction to this series, please see this link. The approximately eight articles and 15 photos in this series will be published evenings at about 6 pm Eastern Time.]

AS I LEFT Auschwitz, the original camp, I stopped to study and photograph the reactions of people gathered near the entrance listening to tour guides tell the story. This photo, taken from inside the camp gate looking outward, pretty much sums it up: a combination of disgust and shock.

These folks look sixtyish, so what they are hearing about happened in their lifetimes or very close to it. This the thing we need to remember: the Holocaust happened recently, in a society just like ours, where a lot of middle class people wanted to enjoy their lives and not be bothered with the affairs of the government.

This is why we need to keep it in mind, and watch to see if any patterns are repeating.

One of the framers of the U.S. Constitution once remarked that the time to start worrying is not when all your rights are gone, but rather when the first of them is threatened. I have noticed that it’s finally becoming less taboo to “be political,” as we figure out that “political” is about OUR lives, our futures. We might want to think of more creative ways to do that, how to raise awareness and how to take action.

Tomorrow night we will begin exploring Auschwitz ii – Birkenau, and see if the history of this place, the Nazis’ most cherished mass human extermination complex, holds any clues for us today.

I’ll catch you tomorrow.

Sign before the electric barbed wire fence at the perimeter of Auschwitz, camp 1.

Auschwitz ii – Birkenau photo surveillance photo, 1944, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Execution wall between Cell Blocks 10 and 11 at Auschwitz. Here, several thousand Poles and Russian prisoners of war lost their lives. Eventually, the executions were moved to other locations, including Auschwitz II – Birkenau. The blacked out window to the left is Cell Block 11, the gynecological torture center. Though it seems vaguely ironic, the Nazis decided that the constant executions were apparently too much for the women being tortured to withstand, so all the windows facing the yard were shuttered. Photo by Eric Francis.

WE ARE ACCUSTOMED to the story of the Nazis being about mass murder, hearing about thousands at a time gassed and cremated. At the beginning, the killing happened one person at a time; and inside the gas chambers, it also happened one at a time even though hundreds of others were present. Was it really the tendency of the Nazis to kill millions that made them what they were, or was it their nonexistent value on the life of an individual?

In seeing the scene above, you are witness to a Nazi execution facility. People such as your mother, your sister, your grandfather, your boyfriend or yourself were forced to strip naked, walk barefoot out into the cold, face that wall and be shot in the back of the head. Their killers could not face them. The pattern of that compressed string was the last thing they saw before they died. These people had no trial, no lawyer and had committed no crime except for existing. The philosophical rationale was that certain groups were undesirable. But it always comes down to an individual person being held as worthless.

This is how we must think of the Holocaust: remembering that each life was indeed a life; that each person who was murdered experienced the fear, horror, shame and loss of being thrown violently from the Earth, for nothing — on the basis of a lie. Imagine facing that wall yourself, and that wall being the last thing you see before you close your eyes and brace for whatever comes next, however it might feel. Imagine that this conduct was a government policy perpetuated under color of law (that is, supposedly legal), which many people approved of, and many, many others stood silent as it went on.

Part of how it went on was because people had no rights. The German government, in part by terrifying people, and in part by blatant trickery, had suspended them all, just like the American government is doing now. People were convinced they were safer without their rights. The German government committed many of its crimes on foreign soil, just like the American government is doing now. But the most menacing thing that both have in common is that the enemy can be anyone, including you. Then, step two: You have no right to prove otherwise.

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Photo above: View from Cell Block 11 towards Cell Block 10 at the original Auschwitz prison facility in Poland. Photo by Eric Francis, taken Sept. 27, 2006.

[Editor's Note: This article was originally published Oct. 6, 2006. For a more detailed introduction to this series, please see this link. The approximately eight articles and 15 photos in this series will be published evenings at about 6 pm Eastern Time.]

YOU HAVE TO HAND IT to the Nutzies: they really were evil, possessed by evil and devoted to its full expression. They were more devoted to evil than the Beatles were to music, and they were more prolific. Not surprisingly, we prefer to remember the Beatles. The Nazis are now a joke or a clichГ©. They are a bunch of movie characters without names. If you mention them, you must be ignorant, an alarmist, a gun collector or a film buff. Besides, it was so long ago; our parents were only kids.

If you take a look at what happened in Germany and Europe between 1933 and 1945, it’s really pretty shocking. Any public library will have a dozen books on the shelf, though I wonder who reads them. Librarians know what happened. Yet no matter how much we may look at them in astonishment, the ordinary people of that era who let it go on, who knew and looked away, are, to me, stranger still. Perhaps we have some reckoning to do with the awesome power of fear, of denial, of elective ignorance.

Tell me: when was the last time you said anything to anyone about the rendition and torture flights conducted by the United States all across Europe the past five years? How many times have you discussed with your friends the American torture center at Guantanamo Bay? I truly hope your answers were ‘recently’ and ‘often’.

Could you bring it up at a dinner party? Continue Reading »

Looking to the right as you walk in through the main gate of Auschwitz Concentration Camp in Oswiecim, Poland. This is the view standing directly beneath the sign that says ‘Arbeit macht frei’, or, ‘Work makes one free’. All the camps had one cynical statement or another posted above the main gate; it was a Nazi tradition. Nobody escaped Auschwitz, and except for some prisoners from the last group to arrive, nobody left alive: more than a million people perished inside these gates or those of Auschwitz ii – Birkenau, 15 minutes away. The phrase above the gate at Buchenwald was ‘Jeden das sein’, or ‘Every man for himself’. Photographed Sept. 27, 2006 by Eric Francis.

[Editor's Note: This article was originally published Oct. 5, 2006. For a more detailed introduction to this series, please see this link. The approximately eight articles and 15 photos in this series will be published evenings at about 6 pm Eastern Time.]

WHEN THE NAZIS took control of Germany in February 1933, there was a fast seizure of, and concentration of, government power, and within eight days, the roundup of enemies of the Reich began.

Hitler was not initially elected. After many months of extremely complex political maneuvering, he was appointed to the office of chancellor by Paul von Hindenburg, then the president of Germany, and this was the transition to the Nazi state. Hitler had been an up-and-coming figure in Germany for decades, and was the leader of something called the National Socialist movement. It had nothing to do with socialism in the true sense of the word; it was fascism supported by business leaders.

Much of how power was concentrated involved a 9/11-like incident called the Reichstag Fire. This is an infamous event in 20th Century history that everyone should know about. Less than a month after Hitler assumed the chancellorship, the building where the German Parliament met in Berlin was burned down, and this was used as an excuse to give the government carte blanche to do anything it needed to “protect people.”

The fire was blamed on the Communists (enemies of the Nazis), but there is trial testimony from the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials that it was set by the Nazis, particularly Hermann GГ¶ring (who, according to court testimony, admitted to it). German notes, a page documenting the history of the Fire, stated: “it is generally believed the Nazi hierarchy was involved in order to reap political gain — and it obviously did.”

In the aftermath of the fire, all basic civil liberties were curtailed, including freedom of the press, and the state granted itself extra powers to stop its supposed enemies — which soon turned out to be everyone. Hindenburg, after signing these laws, died of lung cancer, after which Hitler declared the office of the president perpetually vacant, in effect merging it with the office of chancellor. He thus held both offices for the duration of his life, and the war: about 11 more years.

Initially, prisoners of the Reich were kept in makeshift or improvised facilities, such as the torture yard in Ilvers Gehoffen, now part of Erfurt, or a Roman Catholic citadel on a hill in central Erfurt. [Both of these are covered in my 1998 series on the Holocaust written in Germany.] Continue Reading »

Dear Friend and Reader:

WHEN I RETURNED from Poland with my photos of the Auschwitz concentration camp complex, Fe Bongolan (who now writes in this space) urged me to publish the series sooner rather than later. This was during the congressional race of 2006, and she felt that this information needed to be in public consciousness prior to people having an opportunity to vote. I began the series, which lasted about two weeks, on Oct. 4, 2006, two years ago yesterday. I did notice that it was St. Francis Day. I felt a little safer telling these stories with someone watching over me.

Child and dad walk along the railway tracks, heading back toward the main gate of Auschwitz ii - Birkenau death factory on Sept. 27, 2006. These tracks carried more than one million Europeans to their last destination -- gas chambers several hundred feet away. Photo by Eric Francis.

We may ask why it’s necessary to document Holocaust after what seems like so long. This was a 13 year phase of world history during which an advanced industrial nation set up a philosophy of hatred and a system of death camps, and executed between 12 and 20 million people from throughout Europe. There was a religious agenda — some six million of those killed were Jews.

There were other agendas; another six million were simply anyone, though the German Reich had a particular hatred of the Sinti and Romany people — the Gypsies. Official estimates of how many people were killed seem to stop at about 12 million. I feel it was probably a lot worse, and there was a terrible aftermath that came with Stalin after Russia occupied many previously German territories. Many of the Nazis who had taken the lives of camp victims were themselves put in camps and executed after the allies handed over the territory to them.

I recognize that by posting this series, I am making an implied warning that we are heading for a similar situation at this point in American history no matter who is ahead in the polls. It’s not really that simple. I am in the first instance making a comment about what happened so recently and so nearby, and which therefore exists in potential today. I am also making a comment about what humans — the civilized kind, who get educations, pay taxes and wear clean clothes — are capable of: the abject disregard of life and allowing some horrendous inner shadow of humanity to take them.

And yes, I am saying that the American regime has spread its sadism onto every part of the world, currently and most recently Iraq, and that it’s running out of places to terrorize. I propose for this reason that we take note that we may be next. Depending on how you interpret the events of the past eight to 10 years, that next may have begun quite a while back.

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