Auschwitz

I just finished reading Auschwitz: A New History by Laurence Rees. And I suppose you might wonder why.

We’ve previously established in these posts that there are many more books to read than years I’ve available for their reading. And it’s not like I don’t already know a great deal about the Holocaust. I do.

So why another tome about this horrendous period in humanity’s frequently sordid past? Why not read of more palatable topics?

Because of a dread fascination with how this came to be. Don’t get me wrong, I’m really not interested in the motivations of the Nazis (and others) who perpetrated this massive horror. I’ve known since I was small that there is evil afoot in the world. Evils like ignorance and avarice and ambition and cowardice and sociopathy, all of which played heavily into the formation of the Nazi psyche.

I can’t say it doesn’t bother me that there is evil in the world. There is and ever shall be. But Elie Wiesel reminds us that it is the enabling of evil through the inaction of bystanders that allows evil to find outlet through such atrocities. And Rees’ book, through reliance on interviews with perpetrators, survivors and bystanders, goes further than other sources I’ve seen in explaining how this was allowed  to happen. 

Why did the Danes save 95% of their Jews and the Poles almost none? How did it happen that the citizens of ‘modern’ European countries so readily accepted the persecution of their neighbors, of the Romani people and communists and disabled children and the mentally ill and, and, and…?

I was actually going to go much farther with this but I think I need to leave it for now and spend more time thinking before I continue tapping out my thoughts. Sorry if this seems unfinished because of course, it is. I’m pretty sure I’ll never have an answer to this question but I’m also pretty sure I’ll never stop asking it.