M E R I D I A N     M A G A Z I N E

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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