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?