A photoessay from Rachel Lucas:
You think of Auschwitz, or Poland in general after the Nazis invaded, and you think of bleakness and dreariness. Dark dank sickly winter and snow and death. I took that picture five minutes away from the camp, and there is little doubt in my mind that it looked generally the same way 65 or 70 years ago. The same green grass and the same bright sunshine. Those things didn’t disappear in 1939 and magically regenerate in 1945.
It cracks the heart open to fully comprehend that things like the large-scale industrial genocide that happened at Auschwitz-Birkenau took place in the middle of a perfectly normal world like we saw on that bus ride. It didn’t happen in hell, or in some bleak desert, or any permanently winter-bound nightmare landscape where you can explain away these things more easily. It was just in the middle of this gorgeous countryside.
It’s long, but well worth the read.
I know an man* who survived 3 months in Buchenwald, a terrible place but no where near as bad as Auschwitz. He said that it’s easy to think of the Nazis as some sort of subhuman, knuckle-dragging monsters. However, none of those camps would’ve been possible without the efforts of the architects and engineers who designed and built the camps, the crematoriums, the gas chambers, etc.
Similar lines were spoken on an excellent National Geographic Channel documentary, Scrapbooks from Hell: The Auschwitz Albums. Watch it the next time it airs. It’s well worth your time.
*The man was a 19 year old B-17 pilot from Arkansas who was shot down in 1944. He and 6 members of his crew had the misfortune of being captured by the Gestapo while trying to evade back to England. He and about 180 other American and Allied airmen had the fate fate. Jim says that it was a German Luftwaffe officer who saved their lives by getting them transferred from Buchenwald to an ordinary POW camp, Stalug Luft III in the fall of 1944. That Luftwaffe officer was a military professional, not a thug like the SS.
Another of those airmen has written a book available on Amazon. A book about all of the airmen is also available there.
Thank you for posting this, Rand. It is, as you say, well worth the read.