Houston Chronicle, TX
Jan 26 2005

Auschwitz survivor: Do we still have ears to listen?
Take the moment to renew the vow ‘never forget’
By SAMUEL PISAR

Sixty years ago, the Russians liberated Auschwitz, as the Americans
approached Dachau. The Allied advance revealed to a stunned world the
horrors of the greatest catastrophe ever to befall our civilization.
To a survivor of both death factories, where Hitler’s gruesome
reality eclipsed Dante’s imaginary inferno, being alive and well so
many years later feels unreal.

ADVERTISEMENT

We the survivors are now disappearing one by one. Soon history will
speak of Auschwitz at best with the impersonal voice of researchers
and novelists, at worst with the malevolence of demagogues and
falsifiers. This week the last of us, with a multitude of heads of
state and other dignitaries, are gathering at that cursed site to
remind the world that past can be prologue, that the mountains of
human ashes dispersed there are a warning to humanity of what may
still lie ahead.

The genocides in Armenia, Cambodia, Bosnia, Kosovo and Rwanda and the
recent massacres of innocents in the United States, Spain, Israel,
Indonesia and so many other countries have demonstrated our inability
to learn from the blood-soaked past. Auschwitz, the symbol of
absolute evil, is not only about that past, it is about the present
and the future of our newly enflamed world, where a coupling of
murderous ideologues and means of mass destruction can trigger new
catastrophes.

When the ghetto liquidation in Bialystok, Poland, began, only three
members of our family were still alive: my mother, my little sister
and I, age 13. Father had already been executed by the Gestapo.
Mother told me to put on long pants, hoping I would look more like a
man, capable of slave labor. “And you and Frieda?” I asked. She
didn’t answer. She knew that their fate was sealed. As they were
chased, with the other women, the children, the old and the sick,
toward the waiting cattle cars, I could not take my eyes off them.
Little Frieda held my mother with one hand, and with the other, her
favorite doll. They looked at me too, before disappearing from my
life forever.

Their train went directly to Auschwitz-Birkenau, mine to the
extermination camp of Majdanek. Months later, I also landed in
Auschwitz, still hoping naively to find their trace. When the SS
guards, with their dogs and whips, unsealed my cattle car, many of my
comrades were already dead from hunger, thirst and lack of air. At
the central ramp, surrounded by electrically charged barbed wire, we
were ordered to strip naked and file past the infamous Dr. Josef
Mengele. The “angel of death” performed on us his ritual “selection”
– those who were to die immediately, to the right, those destined to
live a little longer and undergo other atrocious medical experiments,
to the left.

In the background there was music. At the main gate, with its
sinister slogan “Work Brings Freedom,” sat, dressed in striped prison
rags like mine, one of the most remarkable orchestras ever assembled.
It was made up of virtuosos from Warsaw and Paris, Kiev and
Amsterdam, Rome and Budapest. To accompany the selections, hangings
and shootings while the gas chambers and crematoria belched smoke and
fire, these gentle musicians were forced to play Bach, Schubert and
Mozart, interspersed with marches to the glory of the Fuhrer.

In the summer of 1944, the Third Reich was on the verge of collapse,
yet Berlin’s most urgent priority was to accelerate the “final
solution.” The death toll in the gas chambers on D-Day, as on any
other day, far surpassed the enormous Allied losses suffered on the
beaches of Normandy.

My labor commando was assigned to remove garbage from a ramp near the
crematoria. From there I observed the peak of human extermination and
heard the blood-curdling cries of innocents as they were herded into
the gas chambers. Once the doors were locked, they had only three
minutes to live, yet they found enough strength to dig their
fingernails into the walls and scratch in the words “Never Forget.”

Have we already forgotten?

I also witnessed an extraordinary act of heroism. The Sonderkommando
– inmates coerced to dispose of bodies – attacked their SS guards,
threw them into the furnaces, set fire to buildings and escaped. They
were rapidly captured and executed, but their courage boosted our
morale.

As the Russians advanced, those of us still able to work were
evacuated deep into Germany. My misery continued at Dachau. During a
final death march, while our column was being strafed by Allied
planes that mistook us for Wehrmacht troops, I escaped with a few
others. An armored battalion of GIs brought me life and freedom. I
had just turned 16 – a skeletal “subhuman” with shaved head and
sunken eyes who had been trying so long to hold on to a flicker of
hope. “God bless America,” I shouted uncontrollably .

In the autumn of their lives, the survivors of Auschwitz feel a
visceral need to transmit what we have endured, to warn younger
generations that today’s intolerance, fanaticism and hatred can
destroy their world as they once destroyed ours, that powerful alert
systems must be built not only against the fury of nature – a tsunami
or storm or eruption – but above all against the folly of man.
Because we know from bitter experience that the human animal is
capable of the worst, as well as the best – of madness as of genius –
and that the unthinkable remainspossible.

In the wake of so many recent tragedies, a wave of compassion and
solidarity for the victims, a fragile yearning for peace, democracy
and liberty, seem to be spreading around the planet. It is far too
early to evaluate their potential. Mankind, divided and confused,
still hesitates and vacillates. But the irrevocable has not yet
happened; our chances are still intact. Pray that we learn how to
seize them.

Pisar is an international lawyer and the author of “Of Blood and
Hope.”