Remembering
the Dark Night of Auschwitz
Part Four
By
Scot and Maurine Proctor
An institution of dread at Auschwitz was the roll call, held
early in the morning, late in the afternoon—or sometimes just
for torment—in the middle of the night. Prisoners were forced
to stand at attention, motionless, usually sparsely clad for
many hours in the cold, rain, and snow. The terrified inmates
knew that if they wore down and stumbled or fell, they were
sent to be gassed.
Terror, threat and humiliation kept the people in submission
at Auschwitz. Some were kept alive, like rats or mice, to be
the objects of medical experimentation.
Block 10 was a balance of horrors. Being an experimental subject
could prolong life, or end it immediately. An inmate assigned
here might undergo skin testing for reaction to relatively benign
substances, or receive a phenol injection to the heart for immediate
dissection. Doctor Mengele, the most evil man in Auschwitz,
reigned here.
Prisoners would "march before him with their arms in the
air," Dr. Lengyel tells us, " while he continued to
whistle his Wagner"--or it might be Verdi or Johann Strauss.
It was a mannered detachment...
This hall is lined with the portraits of those who died at
Auschwitz.
Wiesel:
"'Don't cry, Yechiel,' I said. 'Don't waste your tears…'
"'Not cry? We're on the threshold of death…Soon we shall
have crossed over…Don't you understand? How could I not cry?'
"Through the blue-tinged skylights I could see the darkness
gradually fading. I had ceased to feel fear. And then I was
overcome by an inhuman weariness.
"Those absent no longer touched even the surface of our
memories. We still spoke of them—'Who knows what may have become
of them?'—but we had little concern for their fate. We were
incapable of thinking of anything at all. Our senses sere blunted;
everything was blurred as in a fog. It was no longer possible
to grasp anything. The instincts of self-preservation, of self-defense,
of pride, had all deserted us. In one ultimate moment of lucidity
it seemed to me that we were damned souls wandering in the half-world,
souls condemned to wander through space till the generations
of man came to an end, seeking their redemption, seeking oblivion—without
hope of finding it."
In these halls at Auschwitz lined with portraits of the dead,
someone remembered a lost one with a flower.
We were taken by this picture because Scot thought it looked
like his mother. She was like so many on this wall of the condemned—once
a vibrant, breathing human being, probably a mother who made
cookies for her children in the afternoon after school and looked
forward to gatherings with friends, whose life was settled and
ordered with books and paintings on the wall, a house full of
memories. Then her life was reduced to a trash heap by the
hands of monsters thinking they worked in the name of virtue.
At the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz in January,
30 world leaders gathered to remember. Vice President Dick Cheney
noted there "the story of the camps shows that evil is
real and must be called by its name and must be confronted."
Yet, today, it is intellectually unpopular to believe in evil,
that it is a reality, tangible as Auschwitz. To discern something
as evil, to acknowledge its existence, is to be labeled as a
religious fanatic. "Can't we all just get along?"
is the mantra of the day. Tolerance is a mighty virtue, a Christian
imperative—in the right time and manner. Yet to close your
eyes to darkness in the name of tolerance is to permit it—even
to support it.
One teacher of a philosophy class at a university was discussing
the tragedy of 9/11 with her students the day after the attack.
Not one of them could say that the act was evil. The idea stymied
their minds, choked in their throats.
Some would say visiting Auschwitz—in person or only in a photo
essay—is depressing and unnecessary. Elie Wiesel had trouble
finding a publisher for Night.
Such dark subject matter.
Yet Robert McAfee Brown makes this important observation:
In Night,
"we learn the geography of 'the valley of the shadow of death,'
about which the psalmist wrote—save that this was a valley in
which people 'fear [ed] evil,' for it was a valley in which 'the
shadow of death' took on substance…six million times. Among the
few who survived the onslaught of that formidable shadow turned
substance, was Elie Wiesel, whose deliverance condemned him to
tell the story to an unbelieving and uncaring world. But because
of his telling, many who did not believe have come to believe,
and some, who did not care have come to care. He tells the story;
out of infinite pain, partly to honor the dead, but also to warn
the living—to warn the living that it could happen again and that
it must never happen again. Better than one heart be broken a
thousand times in the retelling, he has decided, if it means that
a thousand other hearts need not be broken at all.
"At the end of Night, the immediate devastation has ended: the war is over, the
camps are liberated, the author is alive. But the ongoing devastation
has only begun, the devastation that will never end; the devastation
imposed by memory that makes the line between life and death a
thin line indeed…
"Those who hope for hope—after an eternity—are entitled
to do so only if they have measured that which ahs the power to
obscure hope, only if they have lived in the shadow of utter denial.
The rest of us, who have not inhabited the innermost circle of
hell, can never know what it was like to be there. But between
us and the fiery furnaces where they burned babies alive stands
the presence of Elie Wiesel; his presence cast a shadow from
within which we can see, in dimmest outline, the reality he saw
and touched and tasted directly.
"It must be the prayer of our generation that with his
help we can recapture enough of that reality so that it will never
be repeated."
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