Never Again

 

If people meant it, there would be no more genocides.

Alas ...

“‘This is Auschwitz,’ they answered. ‘You will never get out, but you are lucky you were selected to work. Those who were not — look over here, see the chimney, that long chimney with smoke coming out? They are already burning.’

**

The Auschwitz concentration camp is known worldwide as a symbol of terror, genocide and the Holocaust. It was the largest Nazi concentration camp; more than 1.1 million people were murdered there between 1940 and 1945.

On Jan. 27, the world will mark the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Several of the remaining survivors of the camp will make the very difficult trek to the place where some of the most heinous acts of the 20th century occurred.

The survivors will gather there to give voice to Luba, Sara and Chaya and the other silenced millions of Holocaust victims.

**

The non-commissioned officer was Franciszek Gajowniczek. When the sentence of doom had been pronounced, Gajowniczek had cried out in despair, "Oh, my poor wife, my poor children. I shall never see them again." It was then that the unexpected had happened, and that from among the ranks of those temporarily reprieved, prisoner 16670 had stepped forward and offered himself in the other man's place. Then the ten condemned men were led off to the dreaded Bunker, to the airless underground cells were men died slowly without food or water.  ...

Two weeks passed in this way. Meanwhile one after another they died, until only Fr Kolbe was left. This the authorities felt was too long; the cell was needed for new victims. So one day they brought in the head of the sickquarters, a German, a common criminal named Bock, who gave Fr Kolbe an injection of carbolic acid in the vein of his left arm. Fr Kolbe, with a prayer on his lips, himself gave his arm to the executioner. Unable to watch this I left under the pretext of work to be done. Immediately after the SS men with the executioner had left I returned to the cell, where I found Fr Kolbe leaning in a sitting position against the back wall with his eyes open and his head dropping sideways. His face was calm and radiant."

**

Dear brothers and sisters! Because she was Jewish, Edith Stein was taken with her sister Rosa and many other Catholic Jews from the Netherlands to the concentration camp in Auschwitz, where she died with them in the gas chambers. Today we remember them all with deep respect. A few days before her deportation, the woman religious had dismissed the question about a possible rescue: “Do not do it! Why should I be spared? Is it not right that I should gain no advantage from my Baptism? If I cannot share the lot of my brothers and sisters, my life, in a certain sense, is destroyed”. 

 From now on, as we celebrate the memory of this new saint from year to year, we must also remember the Shoah, that cruel plan to exterminate a people — a plan to which millions of our Jewish brothers and sisters fell victim. May the Lord let his face shine upon them and grant them peace

From unimaginable cruelty to kindness:

“The Canadians were like the first figures in a good dream,” one of the women told The New Yorker later that same month. “Our emotion was so intense that we stood motionless, completely dazed,” DuFournier wrote. “We were still too dazed to believe that we might be exchanged,” said Allaire.

Even decades later, the intensity of that moment, of seeing the Canadians and knowing they were saved, stood out, said Helm, who interviewed many survivors, who have since died, for her book.

“I thought it was a dream,” one of the women told Helm. “Really, I did not believe it. It was surreal. We went forward and we saw the soldiers … and they cried when they saw us. When I saw them crying, I began to think it was real.”

The Canadians helped the women into their trucks. There were about 30 of them in Kerr’s rig. One of them had been a nurse. The Nazis had charged her with giving aid to a downed pilot. She’d been in the camp for eight months and she told Kerr how lucky she was to have survived. “She said … they gassed 500 people before you fellows arrived today.”