A post by Pat
Tomorrow, January 27, is Holocaust Remembrance Day. The Auschwitz death camp was liberated on January 27 in 1945. Historian Robert Jan Van Pelt uses the occasion to suggest Auschwitz should be abandoned and forgotten, left for nature to reclaim.
It might be that we will agree that the best way to honour those who were murdered in the camp and those who survived is by sealing it from the world, allowing grass, roots and brambles to cover, undermine and finally efface that most unnatural creation of Man.
I don’t know what the consensus is among Jews about this. It makes no sense to me. The horrendous human suffering at Auschwitz happened because people turned their eyes away. Jorge Semprum, a survivor of Buchenwald who thinks Buchenwald should also revert to nature, is quoted as saying after the last survivor dies “there will no longer be any real memory of this, only the memory of memories related by those who will never know.” Uh, yeah, isn’t that why we have monuments and history books, so we can remember what we should never forget even though it is a faint shadow of what happened?
Antisemitism is as virulent as ever. Despite all evidence the Holocaust deniers and revisionists persist. How can we honour those who were murdered by eradicating the scene of the crime?
Should Auschwitz be left to decay?
Should the world marshal enormous resources to preserve empty shells and faint shadows?
Certainly, as long as there are survivors who desire to return to the place of their suffering, it is appropriate that whatever remains of the camps is preserved.
Many of the same survivors who have told me that I can derive little knowledge from a visit to the camp acknowledge that it was good for them to return to the place, anchoring an all-encompassing nightmare back to a particular place.
The world owes it to them not to close such an opportunity for a return. As long as one survivor is still alive, the remains of the camp should remain available.
But what when there are no survivors left? In his autobiographical novel The Long Voyage (1963), former Buchenwald inmate Jorge Semprun considered what ought to happen with the remains of that camp after the death of the last survivor, “when there will no longer be any real memory of this, only the memory of memories related by those who will never know (as one knows the acidity of a lemon, the feel of wool, the softness of a shoulder) what all this really was.”
Only a memory of memories? I think what people want is to forget what they’ve forgotten. I guess there’s supposed to be something poetic in having verdant nature reclaim the ugliness wrought by man. In my opinion we’ll let nature reclaim Auschwitz when Hell freezes over.
Auschwitz should be preserved until we are absolutely sure another holocaust won’t happen to some other group from some other country. Even for people who would never deny the holocaust, it is easy to forget the true enormity of what happened. The proof of this is all the “Bush=Hitler” garbage that comes from the American radical left. Even if the US were completely unjustified in invading Iraq, the war is not genocide and Guantanamo Bay is not a death camp.
I visited both Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II (Birkenau – where the gassings took place) and they should be preserved for all eternity.
I am an American living in Europe, I want to see both Auschwitz and Birkenau. All these sites should be preserved for all time. Here in the country I live in (Finland) they just showed “Schindler’s List”, a film that everyone should see, along with “The Hiding Place”.
Paul From Hamburg, I agree 100%
I imagine that Pat Buchanan would love that idea
What a sick world this is… let it decay? How could anyone seriously suggest that?
The Jew hatred in this world is approaching if not exceeding WW-II levels.
I cannot fathom what it is like to live every day with memories and scars from confinement in a concentration camp. For me, those survivors’ perspectives have the greatest weight in the debate about how subsequent generations will deal with the legacy of the horror of the Holocaust.
The need to “forget” is understandable. The reasoning by those who believe all vestiges of it should be destroyed, or simply fade away, makes sense in some ways. Nevertheless, everything I’ve ever read indicates to me that those people are in the great minority. In agreement with the majority in this case, I cannot think of a better way to hold the line against those who for whatever agenda, either well-meaning or not, would prefer that the Holocaust simply disappear. The physical presence of the sites of such evil and suffering cannot be overlooked and diminishes the assertions of the Holocaust-deniers. It’s difficult enough to hold those idiots at bay even with the camps still in existence. As long as they exist, they provide objective proof in the face of the denials.
I visited Dachau with friends in 1994. Walking through the gate is a solemn experience. The place is creepy, even with the conversion to a museum-like atmosphere. It was difficult to think of anything else for days, and it has never left us. Only a person who consciously INTENDS to believe (or promote) something else about these camps can enter the gates and escape the horrific reality of why they exist. Letting go of these places will erase the last, best testimony after the final survivor has died. J
They should be maintained as any museum or living history exhibit, not allowed to grow over with vegetation and decay. Holocaust revisionists or deniers would like nothing more than to have all evidence of the Holocaust obliterated and forgotten, and if that was allowed to happen, once the survivors are gone, there’s nothing and no one to gainsay them and their denials. Should Anne Frank’s Secret Annex allowed to go to ruin? Mount Vernon? Iwo Jima? Omaha Beach? Pearl Harbor? Lots of people died there. . .those sites might bring about sadness and melancholy. They are like those rubber bands that need to be snapped to remind you that what you have done was wrong and not to do it again.
I was on a tour that visited Auschwitz in 2003. Afterwards, the teenagers in our group were completely speechless for half an hour. Later one of them said that if it was up to him he would burn the place to the ground. I asked him if he would have believed it if he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes…and then he understood why it had to be preserved.
There are already way too many people who don’t believe it happened. The value of the experience of walking through that horrible place cannot be measured.
Auschwitz and other such places that commemorate history, exist for the very reasons that the memories should never die, in order to guarantee, hopefully, they never occur again. Any museum exists to preserve memories and historical facts of “what happened”. Most museums have the phrase posted that those who don’t know the past are doomed to repeat it. How many kids of the last few generations are horrendously ignorant of history?
I’m a volunteer at a local air museum. We fear the downturn in the economy will make it increasingly difficult to obtain necessary operating and preservation funds. All museums will face similar challenges. History must be preserved regardless of the contrary wishes of the left. What better way to deny history than to remove its evidence?
Robert Jan Van Pelt has misinterpreted the documentary “Night and Fog”, which he incorrectly mentions in his article as an example of why Aushwitz should be forgotten by history.
Van Pelt mistakenly points out that the film shows the camp as it appeared in 1955 and that “the narrator warns the viewer that these remains do not reveal the wartime reality of ‘endless, uninterrupted fear’. The barracks offer no more than ‘the shell, the shadow’. Should the world marshal enormous resources to preserve empty shells and faint shadows?”
The documentary director, Alain Resnais, deliberately took an indirect approach to the film, for practical reasons. It was 1955, and the French director thought that macabre scenes from actual footage would make the holocaust seem too surreal for viewers, defeating the purpose of the film, which was to help the audience grasp the horrors of Aushwitz. Therefore, Resnais filmed the site as it was in the 50′s, saving actual holocaust footage for the end of the film to aid viewer comprehension, not drive viewers away.
Ironically, Robert Jan Van Pelt admits that Resnais’ writer, Jean Cayrol, was an Aushwitz survivor. Why would a writer relive such a horrifying personal experience, let alone go back to the site to document it for a film, if the holocaust wasn’t meant to be a part of recorded history?
I’ve seen “Night and Fog”, and I recommend you see it as well. It is very well made and was one of the first documentaries made on the Holocaust. Robert Jan Van Pelt has not bothered to do his research. If he had, he would see that the film not only contradicts his contention, it undermines the entire argument.