The Question of Humanity (with a little Polish nonsense on the side)

It's a strange thing to be able to walk into Auschwitz. To walk through the barbed wire gates, under the sign bearing the infamous slogan "Arbeit Macht Frei", past the execution wall and the building where Dr. Mengele conducted his experiments. To peek into the gas chambers and see the tall chimney of the crematorium, and then to simply walk back out as easily as one came.

This was my reality the past week, when we traveled to Poland to see important sites from the Holocaust and discuss what the Holocaust says about the true nature of man. But before I get into anything, let's start with some (extremely) basic background:

Hitler took office in 1933 as the chancellor of an incredibly economically depressed Germany. Taking advantage of the already strong anti-semitic sentiments in the country, Hitler used the Jews as scapegoats for Germany's problems. Hitler introduced the idea of racial supremacy (which was not such a stretch from the concept of social Darwinism which was prevalent at the time), and began the slow process of stripping the Jews of their humanity. While millions of others were killed in the Holocaust, only Jews were marked for complete annihilation. After a few years of systematic humiliation and discrimination, Hitler introduced the Nuremburg laws in 1935, which defined what a Jew was (constituted of having three Jewish grandparents) and stripped the Jews of many rights, including the right to citizenship, the ability to own or operate a business, and the right to marry a non-Jew. Judaism was turned from a faith to a race, making it impossible to convert out of being a Jew. One was a Jew from birth, whether or not they were observant. Many say the point of no return came in 1938 with Kristallnacht, when non-Jews burned and looted Jewish businesses, homes, and synagogues. On September 1 1939, the Germans invaded Poland and won within a week. Soon after, Jewish ghettos were established in major cities, and hundreds of thousands of Jews were forced to inhabit areas where only a few thousand had lived previously. Food rations in the ghetto allowed for a diet of only a few hundred calories per person, and the population was slowly starved. For the smaller towns and villages, there was the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile killing squad which followed behind the army and went from town to town, taking the Jewish inhabitants out to the forests, forcing them to dig mass graves, and then shooting them. The Einsatzgruppen could get rid of an entire community in two days. Death and labor camps were established around the end of 1941, and the deportations from the ghettos began. At the start of 1942, twenty-five percent of the those who would be murdered in the Holocaust had died, but by the end of 1943 the number rose to eighty percent. In 1944, the Russians took over Poland, incorporating the country into the Soviet Union and effectively ending the camps, but the official end of the war didn't come until May 1945 when they occupied Berlin and Germany surrendered.

Before the war, Jews made up a third of the Polish population. At present, there are only a few thousand Jews left in the country. But these numbers and figures are only a tiny fraction of the narrative. The real story lies in the accounts of towns like Tykocin, where Jews and Christians lived side by side for 400 years. The first day the Einsatzgruppen arrived, they rounded up the Jewish population and took them out to the Lopochova forest to be shot. The next day they searched each house in the village and found another 600-700 Jews who had been hidden by their neighbors. They took these Jews to be shot as well. Only three hours after the second round of killings was complete and the Jewish population of Tykocin was wiped out, the remaining population of the town looted the Jews' homes and businesses, as well as the synagogue. The people with whom the Jews had grown up with and coexisted with for many generations suddenly thought only of how they could personally gain from the brutal murder of their Jewish neighbors.

There are millions of stories of indifference from the Holocaust. When we visited Majdanek, and well-preserved death and labor camp, we saw how the city comes right up to the edge of the barbed wire fence. While there's been some urban growth since the 40's, the edge of the town was not that much farther off from the camp then. Indeed it was close enough that the people living near Majdanek found ashes on their laundry when they hung it out to dry, yet they still managed to happily turn a blind eye. Now how exactly does this happen? How does one grow up with a Jew, or anyone for that matter, and then become completely indifferent to their extermination? How do you say, "I really liked her, it's such a shame she's a Jew"? How does one manage to convince themself so completely that an entire population is subhuman and unworthy of life?

We all love to believe that humankind is innately good, and evil tendencies are drawn out by temptation and constructions such as the devil. But what does war say about human nature? Though there were instances of heroism during the Holocaust, there were millions more of cruelty and indifference. Is that an indication of who we are as people? Do war and other extreme situations pervert man's true nature, or is that when we truly reveal it? Are we always trying to do the right thing, or does cruelty and indifference come naturally to us? Are we simply naive for assuming that mankind is innately good? Are places like Auschwitz an expression of some kind of humanity that's in all of us?

If I call myself human, it is easy to say that the Nazis were inhuman, that what separates me from Hitler is too great to have any point of comparison. But saying that releases the Nazis from responsibility for what they did. Saying they are inhuman releases them from being judged by the standards of humanity; thus they must be human. According to Professor Emmanuel Bergman, what makes humans human is the freedom of morality. He says we have the power to chose our own nature, and in that choice we affirm the nature of humankind. For example, if one sins, they judge the entire world to be corrupt. If one does a good deed, he judges the entire world to be righteous. The Nazis, as well as countless bystanders, saw humans as animals and hence freed themselves from having to make a choice about their nature or morality. They saw Auschwitz as natural an instinct as a predator devouring its prey. Their choice was reflected in their ideology and practice. Therefore what connects me to Hitler as a human is not our actions but rather the ability to chose.

This leaves all of us with a choice to make. Will we judge mankind to be corrupt or will we judge it to be righteous? And how will we affirm this choice?

We must also realize that we always have a choice, even in the most hellish of places, where it seems nothing exists but despair. Let me share another story, one that affirms the goodness of the human spirit. Treblinka is a death camp in Poland. There are no factories for labor, no selection for the ones who are fit to work, just a gas chamber and a crematorium. It is a factory of death, able to process a train carrying 6000 people in just a few hours. To help put that in perspective, that's a college football stadium. That's everyone you've ever met. The only barracks that exist are for the German SS guards and for the Sonderkommando, the Jews chosen from the trains coming in to operate the camp. These are the ones who unload the trains, escort the people to the gas chambers, close the doors, and load the ovens. They shave the people's heads in order to sell their hair to textile companies. They search for gold teeth and sort through the suitcases of the deceased in order to send their goods back to Germany to finance the operation. The Sonderkommando are forced to work, as death is the alternative. And every few months, the Sonderkommando themselves are sent to the gas chambers in order to prevent an uprising.

When forced to work for fear of death, one is certain there is no other choice. But the Sonderkommando at Treblinka realized that without them, there is no operation. They are the workers of the factory. They unload the trains, fill the gas chambers, and load the ovens. This one group of Sonderkommando decided to stop helping the Germans to kill the Jews, and in short, they planned to escape. Though almost all of them were killed in the uprising, following this event, Treblinka was closed down, as there was no one left to run it.

The same choice existed for the secretaries who typed the reports on the progress of the extermination, the train conductor who ran the line to Treblinka, and the people who found ashes on their laundry when they hung it out to dry. By no means am I saying it was an easy choice. The secretary, the train conductor, and the housewife all had families to take care of, mouths to feed, and a will to live. It's also likely that anyone in their position would have reacted the same way and made the same choices. But they could have made a different choice that, if enough people made, would have changed the outcome of the Holocaust.

There's really no appropriate way to conclude this post, so I'll wrap up by telling you about the more ridiculous aspects of our pilgrimage to eastern Europe.

- On the bus between camps, ghettos, and museums, we watched Holocaust movies. I know it seems a little messed up but when it comes down to it there's not a lot else you can do on the way from Auschwitz to Birkenau, and we also had the opportunity to see some really good movies. And some really bad movies. As inspirational as "Escape from Sobibor" was (about an uprising by the Sonderkommando similar to the one at Treblinka I which I talked about earlier), you would think someone would think long and hard about releasing a film with acting that was that bad.

- The Polish language looks like someone fell asleep on a keyboard, and it was also the language of choice for Borat, making it pretty difficult to take seriously. Though we learned a few words of Polish, such as "gin dobray", meaning good morning, and "jankooyay", meaning thank you, I just couldn't bring myself to thank the waiters or bus-drivers in Polish for fear of sounding like I was mocking them. (Also please note that the spellings of the Polish words are my own phonetic interpretations and not the authentic Polish spelling because, as I said, Polish is not only a completely unreadable language to a Westerner, but the alphabet is also deceptively different. For example, W is pronounced as a V, and J is pronounced as a Y.)

- Our last night in Poland we went to a "Polish Folklore Dinner", which was a bit of a misnomer. They served falafel and pita, and had a Polish woman singing Hebrew karaoke. However, the entertainment did include one Polish element - a dance troupe performing traditional Polish dances and singing. While I understood none of what they were saying, one of the acts included someone dressed up a a cow and a good bit of yodeling, so it was obviously a great night.

And so concluded our trip Poland. "Interesting" doesn't really cut it. It was terrifying, inspirational, confusing, important, and, as always on Workshop 59, just a little bit ridiculous.