"must read" In case you missed it, a memory refresher from today's NY Times

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Ted Dolotta <Ted () Dolotta ORG>
Date: May 14, 2006 5:58:37 PM EDT
To: IP List <dave () farber net>
Subject: In case you missed it, a memory refresher from today's NY Times
Reply-To: Ted () Dolotta ORG

Dave,

A "must read" piece for IP.

Thanks,

Ted Dolotta
=============================================================
May 14, 2006

Correspondent, 1958, From Abroad, Writing the Unspeakable

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

A. M. Rosenthal, the former New York Times executive editor, died
last week at the age of 84. He first gained prominence as a
foreign correspondent. This article, about his visit to Auschwitz,
was published in The Times Magazine on Aug. 31, 1958.

BRZEZINKA, Poland

THE most terrible thing of all, somehow, was that at Brzezinka the
sun was bright and warm, the rows of graceful poplars were lovely
to look upon and on the grass near the gates children played.

It all seemed frighteningly wrong, as in a nightmare, that at
Brzezinka the sun should ever shine or that there should be light
and greenness and the sound of young laughter. It would be fitting
if at Brzezinka the sun never shone and the grass withered,
because this is a place of unutterable terror.

And yet, every day, from all over the world, people come to
Brzezinka, quite possibly the most grisly tourist center on earth.
They come for a variety of reasons - to see if it could really
have been true, to remind themselves not to forget, to pay homage
to the dead by the simple act of looking upon their place of
suffering.

Brzezinka is a couple of miles from the better-known southern
Polish town of Oswiecim. Oswiecim has about 12,000 inhabitants, is
situated about 171 miles from Warsaw and lies in a damp, marshy
area at the eastern end of the pass called the Moravian Gate.
Brzezinka and Oswiecim together formed part of that minutely
organized factory of torture and death that the Nazis called
Konzentrationslager Auschwitz.

By now, 14 years after the last batch of prisoners was herded
naked into the gas chambers by dogs and guards, the story of
Auschwitz has been told a great many times. Some of the inmates
have written of those memories of which sane men cannot conceive.
Rudolf Franz Ferdinand Hoss, the superintendent of the camp,
before he was executed wrote his detailed memoirs of mass
exterminations and the experiments on living bodies. Four million
people died here, the Poles say.

And so there is no news to report about Auschwitz. There is merely
the compulsion to write something about it, a compulsion that
grows out of a restless feeling that to have visited Auschwitz and
then turned away without having said or written anything would
somehow be a most grievous act of discourtesy to those who died
here.

Brzezinka and Oswiecim are very quiet places now; the screams can
no longer be heard. The tourist walks silently, quickly at first
to get it over with and then, as his mind peoples the barracks and
the chambers and the dungeons and flogging posts, he walks
draggingly. The guide does not say much either, because there is
nothing much for him to say after he has pointed.

For every visitor, there is one particular bit of horror that he
knows he will never forget. For some it is seeing the rebuilt gas
chamber at Oswiecim and being told that this is the "small one."
For others it is the fact that at Brzezinka, in the ruins of the
gas chambers and the crematoria the Germans blew up when they
retreated, there are daisies growing.

There are visitors who gaze blankly at the gas chambers and the
furnaces because their minds simply cannot encompass them, but
stand shivering before the great mounds of human hair behind the
plate glass window or the piles of babies' shoes or the brick
cells where men sentenced to death by suffocation were walled up.

One visitor opened his mouth in a silent scream simply at the
sight of boxes - great stretches of three-tiered wooden boxes in
the women's barracks. They were about six feet wide, about three
feet high, and into them from 5 to 10 prisoners were shoved for
the night. The guide walks quickly through the barracks. Nothing
more to see here.

A brick building where sterilization experiments were carried out
on women prisoners. The guide tries the door - it's locked. The
visitor is grateful that he does not have to go in, and then
flushes with shame.

A long corridor where rows of faces stare from the walls.
Thousands of pictures, the photographs of prisoners. They are all
dead now, the men and women who stood before the cameras, and they
all knew they were to die.

They all stare blank-faced, but one picture, in the middle of a
row, seizes the eye and wrenches the mind. A girl, 22 years old,
plumply pretty, blonde. She is smiling gently, as at a sweet,
treasured thought. What was the thought that passed through her
young mind and is now her memorial on the wall of the dead at
Auschwitz?

Into the suffocation dungeons the visitor is taken for a moment
and feels himself strangling. Another visitor goes in, stumbles
out and crosses herself. There is no place to pray at Auschwitz.

The visitors look pleadingly at each other and say to the guide,
"Enough."

There is nothing new to report about Auschwitz. It was a sunny day
and the trees were green and at the gates the children played.

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company



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