Auschwitz

January, 2011

I can’t stop thinking about the moment they knew.

And the soot on the ceiling.

That, too.

Because I looked up.

I looked up—and by then I was feeling as if my breath wouldn’t quite come, that my lungs were constricted, gripped by something huge that I couldn’t possibly come to terms with, that I couldn’t quite let in, that I couldn’t accept as a possibility, no, not even a possibility. So I glanced up—maybe because it felt wrong to look for too long directly at the ovens with their heavy metal doors, the ones that you see in pictures that swing open and shut and look like submarine compartment hatches with the big, brass wheels that lock the door tightly shut when it’s time to do that, when the bodies are in, and I looked up and saw the soot on the ceiling, and I don’t know why I didn’t expect to see soot, but of course, I should have, when you think of it, I should have expected it, but I didn’t, and I looked up, and instantly remembered seeing soot like this on another ceiling in another place a long time ago.

It was in Egypt somewhere—an interminable, dusty and uncomfortable van ride into the countryside—to a place in the middle of nothing where the first generation of Christians went to hide out, centuries ago, in the first century A.D., in fact, to hide from the Romans and the others who wanted to kill them because they had become followers of this Jesus the Carpenter, so they hid out in the relics of a temple, a temple that 2000 years ago was already 1,000 years old, a 2,000-year-old temple that was even then in ruins. Amid the soaring, decaying columns and the yawning, mysterious, shadowy caverns, it was the small wall etchings—nothing more than that—the 2000-year-old wall etchings—that made me amazed.

But even more remarkable than the graffiti— and that’s what it was, really, primitive drawings of the fish symbol, the well-known early-Christian “tag” that survives amongst the evangelicals today—even more remarkable than the fish symbol carved into the columns of the temple ruins, carved 2,000 years ago by those frightened but determined Christians, more remarkable than that was the 2,000-year-old soot on the ceiling, created by the furtive campfires of those early Christians 2,000 years ago, and I wondered, then,  how long  it would take for the soot to go away, would it last forever, would  it never go away, and maybe my mind had had enough, this day in this place, and maybe it had more than it could bear as I turned away from the ovens at Auschwitz and looked up at the ceiling and saw the soot—of course there was soot, yes, of course, when you think of it, because thousands of burning bodies, no, not thousands but tens of thousands and even more than that, would produce soot, like the campfires of the early Christians somewhere in Egypt, only completely different, I guess it’s completely different, but, still, it’s soot on the ceiling, my God, it’s soot on the ceiling. My dear God, it’s soot on the ceiling…

And the moment they knew. Thinking about that is making me try to not think about it, and I shake my head so vigorously that maybe it will go away, but it doesn’t, and I have a feeling it’s not going to, ever.

You see, they gave them hooks. Small hooks, everyday hooks, on the walls of the basement corridor, a cramped, unpleasant corridor that was provided to them for the purpose of disrobing, which they would do, experiencing the mortification that was undoubtedly intended. They did this together, men, women and children, strangers and the opposite of strangers, and each hook had a number, and they were told to be sure to remember the number of the hook on which they left their clothes so they could retrieve them after they were showered and de-liced.

And this, too: As you look at the remnants of the changing room, down at the end, on the left, adjoining this room and perpendicular to it, of similar size, is the “shower” room, long and narrow. It was also underground, originally, and has no ceiling now, just the foundational remains and parts of the walls, enough so that you can visualize it and get a sense of its dimensions, its size, and as you look at this, you say to yourself that this room, this “shower room” would be crowded if there were one hundred people in it—but you know that as the pellets were dropped, there were not one hundred people in this room, there were fifteen hundred: Naked, frightened, degraded, humiliated, but, still, hopeful, because, after all, they needed to remember the number of their hook so that they could retrieve their clothes. Would the water be cold or would it at least be warm—but then, knowing the Germans, would it be scalding? What would happen and when will it be over and how can I endure this?

And then, of course, there came a moment, and that’s the moment I can’t get out of my thoughts, as the pellets began to hiss and there was no water and it was clear that they were being murdered, that this was the end; and I keep thinking that of all those people there must have been one or two or maybe a lot, as it started to happen, who thought of those hooks and said to themselves that this cannot be—because of the hooks, they told us to remember the number of the hooks— because, by telling them to remember the number of their hook, they were giving them hope, a belief that once they survived to mortification of mass nakedness, the degradation of this particular moment, this communal shower, that at least they would live to see what future moments they might be forced to endure, but at least there would be those moments, and maybe their children would survive this shower and this day, and the hooks told them that there was to be a future, no matter how horrible.

But, of course, the hooks were a lie, a ruse to allay panic, and those who told them this lie knew full well that there was absolutely no hope whatsoever at that point, no future at all, excepting a brief one that would seem to last an eternity, the fifteen or twenty minutes it would take them to die painfully from the Zyklon B pellets dropped on them as the final indignity; and they realized that this tale of the hooks was the final lie and maybe the very cruelest one of all, beyond even the physical cruelty and the intentional humiliation, all of it, beyond all of that, all because maybe, really, that is the one truly unforgivable thing, to give a desperate person hope when there is none, and you know there is none, and the reason you do so is for your own convenience.

It was a pragmatic lie, they would have you believe, and a compassionate one, after all. But, of course, it wasn’t that, because, if it was, if there was any capacity at all for compassion of even the tiniest sort, it would not manifest itself in only this one thing, it would have to appear, even if ever so slightly, elsewhere, but it doesn’t, and it wasn’t compassion, it was insolence and contempt, and with that realization, the moment arrived that could not be misinterpreted, that moment when they knew they were being murdered and that the hooks were the very last way they had to defile the soul, the essence, the being, the one they were now, at this moment, in the process of extinguishing.

What Zeitgeist is this,that could produce the thought that produced the hooks?

* * *

The Sign at the Entrance

“Throughout the world, Auschwitz has become a symbol of terror, genocide, and the Holocaust. The German forces occupying Poland during the Second World War established a concentration camp, on the outskirts of a town called Oświęcim in 1940; the Germans called the town Auschwitz and that is the name by which the camp was known. Over the next years it was expanded into three main camps: Auschwitz I, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, and Auschwitz III-Manowitz and more than forty sub camps. The first people to be brought to Auschwitz as prisoners and murdered here were Poles. They were followed by Soviet prisoners of war, Gypsies and deportees of many different nationalities. Beginning in 1942, however, Auschwitz became the setting for the most massive murder campaign in history, when the Nazis put into operation their plan to destroy the entire Jewish population of Europe. The great majority of Jews who were deported to Auschwitz—men, women and children—were sent immediately upon arrival to death in the gas chambers of Birkenau. When the SS realized that the end of the war was near, they attempted to remove the evidence of the atrocities committed here. They dismantled the gas chambers, crematoria, and other buildings, burned documents, and evacuated all those prisoners who could walk to the interior of Germany. Those who were not evacuated were liberated by the Red Army on January 27, 1945.”

PLEASE BEHAVE APPROPRIATELY, RESPECTING THE MEMORY OF THOSE WHO SUFFERED AND DIED HERE

The Place

Auschwitz I, the original, the one you go to first, with the Arbeit Mach Frie archway, is smaller than you expect. The red brick buildings, in row after row, neatly arranged with each having an end facing a wide causeway, were originally barracks for the Polish soldiers, so they are built with care and constructed sturdily, which is why today, even today, they are, now, as they were, as they were seen and experienced, pretty much the same, by those who would command here and those who would die here.  The artisan hands that laid the rows of bricks one upon the other could not have known that in just a few years, their work would house some of the most horrific, unimaginable and unpardonable human experiments the world has ever known, administered by the infamous Dr. Mengele and others, that the small wall they built, one of the many all alike that connect the rear of each building to its neighbor, forming a kind of courtyard, one would be pretty if planted with flowers, say, instead of used for the firing squad death of literally thousands of guiltless inmates, they would have been surprised, probably, that one of these walls would be used for that purpose.

But it was.

“The banality of evil” Hannah Arendt called it, and you sense it in the small room, shown above (in a not very good picture; my hands were beginning to shake) with the narrow table around which six or eight uniformed Gestapo agents sat on hard backed chairs as they meted out the death penalty—it was never any different and it sometimes took less than a minute—to the prisoner who stood and could see, looking across the table through the window just a few feet away, the very wall against which he was about to die. The brick wall is reinforced with a thick coating because so many bullets passed through the prisoners that the wall would have, otherwise, been demolished in the endless, rhythmic chain of killing:

 

* * *

Auschwitz. We’ve all heard the stories and seen the pictures, and being there suddenly makes it all real, or more real, or real in a way that never having been here can’t do, I think.

It is mid-winter, the season with fewest visitors, but it is uncomfortably crowded, and, worse, since you are required to go with a guide, and there are many others in a group, the guide is in charge of the pace, and the pace is rushed, annoyingly so, and the crowds keep moving and jostling and if you pause you create problems, and your guide will ask you to move along please, keep moving, and it’s disorienting and everyone feels it. There is just too much, too quickly, and you never get the chance to catch your balance or just to think, as if you are assailed by a piercing cacophony of sound so overwhelming that you can’t make out the notes, no matter how hard you try.

In the neatly ordered brick cell-blocks, well preserved even now, there are the exhibits, and those, too, you’ve seen many pictures of:  The ones with the piles of eyeglasses, and mountains of shoes, and suitcase after abandoned suitcase, each one crudely painted, on the order of the Nazi’s, with the person’s name, a ruse and a deceit, as if their name, at that point, mattered. Occasionally the prisoners took the time to make a small embellishment on their suitcase with the dripping paintbrush they were provided, to add a decoration, to personalize it, and now the suitcase remains, decades later, one of thousands, and in the most horrible way imaginable, ridiculous an heartbreaking in a more simple way than the other… exhibits.

The corridor walls are lined with thousands upon thousands of pictures of thousands upon thousands of prisoners, the galleries of the doomed. They are mug shots taken by the Nazis upon the subject’s arrival, each one a kind of cynical triptych with a face, frontal view and then a right profile and a left profile on either side. The inmate wears the familiar stripes, and so, taken together, all these thousands of mug shots, looked at broadly, they form a visual pattern on the walls, a kind of awful texture, until you look more closely, as slowly as the guide will allow, and you begin to see individuals and to notice unique and revelatory aspects about them, tiny things, a raised eyebrow, a scar, perhaps a gold tooth, a human detail, and now you are looking at a person, just as you begin to imagine and to connect you hear the voice “move along”…

Since these pictures were taken upon the inmate’s arrival, and even though the journey, by all accounts, was horrific, so much so that many did not survive even that first part of the ordeal, the faces, these people in these mug shots, look surprisingly healthy, even robust. Frightened, yes, in these photos, but not yet what they would become so quickly: Skeletal and done. Each triptych records, in Germanic meticulousness, the date of arrival and then the date of death, and you begin to do the math and realize than none of them lived more than a few months. Without even intending to you begin to look at each picture and try and guess, based upon the sturdiness you perceive in this picture taken upon their arrival, whether they were able to endure for a longer time—the longest I could find was five months—or did they succumbed more quickly. You try, that is, to discern something from the faces, some predictability about the state of their at best very limited future (but how limited you wonder, how much were they able to endure before the end, how many days, compared to…) You look for some bit of knowledge about the particulars, about that specific person, as if somehow that might humanize them, bring them forward from the black and white of the print, somehow make them more real, someone to connect with—and I’m not sure why there is such an impulse to do that, but there is.

There is a wide array of ages, and the people in this group of mug shots I’m looking at includes a range from young boys to middle aged men, and since the arrival dates are all the same, it’s sure that they came from the same place at the same time and probably knew each other. The pictures of one young man, his particular triptych, catches my eye, fresh faced, newly cropped hair, really a crew cut in another world, the two profiles and the full face with eyes looking directly at the camera. He looks fit and typical and has nice eyes and I see from the notation that he will live four months from the date of this picture. But there is something in his expression that puzzles me, some thought or feeling seeping from his demeanor that reaches out and I can’t quite pinpoint what it is, this thing reaching out from him, through the eyes, really, above the plump cheeks. Certainly he is afraid, and confused, and disoriented, all that, and you see those things in every picture. But there is something else, and I stare at the triptych, the young boy’s mug shot for a long time, puzzling over what it is, what it is that I’m seeing that is not those other things but which is something else and in addition to it. Finally I know what it is, the communication I’m perceiving in his expression:

He is trying to figure out what they want him to do.

You sense as you look at his picture that he has enough hope left, and enough life, to believe that if he can figure out what they want him to do—if he can figure out what they want him to do—he can survive. You realize that this is what he believes, at that moment, when they are taking his picture and you feel terribly guilty, and in a way ashamed, that you know, now, what he didn’t know then, because, if he had, if he had known what you know, his expression would have, instead, reflected the knowledge of his certain doom, and not an eagerness to figure it out, because there was nothing to figure out, absolutely nothing at all.

Still, as you look into his eyes you can put yourself in his place, ever so slightly and ever so inadequately, but just enough to connect with the fear of it, at least a scintilla of it, and to connect with the idea that if you were sitting there, your mind, too, would be racing through the possibilities, keenly sensitive to any nuance, any clue that would help you determine, if only for the next few minutes, what you needed to do, to figure out, in order to survive.

No, he doesn’t know that what they want him to do– the only thing they want him to do—is to die, and they will see to it that he does just that, because the point is not the slave labor, the point is the dying. The work, the productivity, was secondary and it is a mistake to think that the Germans had any interest in doing what was necessary to sustain the lives of the people whose labor they were making good use of. On the contrary: The labor was designed to kill them and that’s exactly what it did, rapidly, to even the most vigorous arrivals, and it is clear from German records found after the war that the dying was exactly the point, that the labor should be configured specifically to induce death, just that, quite clearly, and it was explicit:

No? Consider this, these notes from the Wannsee Conference, where Nazis at the highest level got together to discuss in a very deliberate and scholarly way—albeit in secret due to the… sensitivity of the issues, at least to some of the more squeamish and less dedicated, you know, the weaker ones—the final solution to the “Jewish Problem”. As you read these minutes from that conference, pay particular attention to the use of the phrase “natural causes”:

[Even in the official German transcript which was heavily censored, Reinhard Heydrich who was hosting the meeting made the ultimate fate intended for Jewish evacuees clear:

"Under proper guidance, in the course of the final solution the Jews are to be allocated for appropriate labor in the East. Able-bodied Jews, separated according to sex, will be taken in large work columns to these areas for work on roads, in the course of which action doubtless a large portion will be eliminated by natural causes. The possible final remnant will, since it will undoubtedly consist of the most resistant portion, have to be treated accordingly, because it is the product of natural selection and would, if released, act as the seed of a new Jewish revival"]

That’s why some of the work was manufactured and pointless at times: Because it wasn’t about the work it was about the killing. Yes, the work, the slave labor, was put to good use, and one of the factories created at the time sustains the nearby town of Oświęcim to this very day.

We all know about the tattoos, crudely embedded on the inner forearms. I, perhaps like you, have always thought they were there so that each prisoner could be identified, at any moment it might be necessary to do so:

But, no, the identification was not intended for the person, it was intended for the corpse, and that was the sole purpose of the tattoo: So that when the prisoner died, they could connect the number on the arm of the corpse to the live body that had first entered the system, and been recorded, and been tattooed, and by that connection, one to the other, they could thereby know exactly how many days it took for them to die.

This information, when accumulated, was considered useful. But, other than that one, singular purpose for the tattoo—to connect the corpse to the date of entry—the Germans had absolutely no other interest in any aspect of the individuality of any other person. None.

* * *

So you move on and maybe stop at a few more pictures but the ringing in your ears increases, and the claustrophobia of the crowded brick buildings creates a feeling of something horrendous closing in, because the blood in your veins is being pushed too hard and you are reacting physically to a kind of inky darkness of the soul all around you.

Everything has a fractured, monstrous logic. They cut the hair off the corpses, not because they could use it for mattresses, which they did, or because they could make fabric out of it, which they did. They cut off the hair of the corpses because, as you know if you’ve ever singed your own hair, when hair burns it has a distinctive, penetrating smell, and if they burned the hair along with the bodies, all the other inmates would smell the hair and know they were burning corpses back there at the very far end of the camp, just in the woods, the place where there were supposed to be showers and de-licing stations, you know, the place where they kept the crematoria.

I have not yet understood that here at the “original” Auschwitz, with the neat rows of brick buildings and the places where they did the experiments, and even where I have visited the fully functional “oven” where there was soot on the ceiling and where I stopped taking pictures even though others all around me were snapping and clicking and flashing, because I just couldn’t take pictures in that place, in that spot—no I have not yet understood that this is not the worst of it, not by far, not by a very wide margin, and if you had said that to me, I would have responded that, no, that is impossible, no, it can’t, it simply can’t get worse than  this, but that was before I got on the bus with the others and was driven the three kilometers away, to Birkenau.

_______________________________________

 

The Selection

You’ve seen this spot in he photo shown above in many B&W photos, like the one at right. It’s where they disembarked the prisoners, which is to say, it’s where those who were still alive after the journey spilled out from the suffocating, fetid cattle cars and were told to line up for the “selection” process.

The process was peremptory and final. Those deemed sufficiently fit to be likely to be able to last the usual three to four months at slave labor were steered towards the barracks. The rest, in the opposite direction, towards the communal “showers” that lay at the end of this fifteen foot wide, perfectly flat, perfectly straight stone-and-dirt road leading to the ovens. This view looks directly up the road over which they walked to the ovens, which were waiting, unbeknownst to them, along the tree line you can see in the distance.

__________________________________________

The Walk

I made that walk, to the ovens, along with the thirty or so others in my guided group. It is a long walk, longer than you would think, probably five minutes, and that is a long time when you imagine the demoralized souls who made this walk, group after group, day after day, and you know what they did not know: That it was a walk that would not be accompanied by a return.

My group and I walked without speaking. The sound we made, the only sound, was the familiar, small crunch of our boots pressing and squeezing through a thin dusting of fresh snow. I realized that if I looked down and almost completely closed my eyes, if I listened only to the sound of the boots and shoes of we thirty people in that fresh snow, if I listened only to that and looked at nothing, then I was probably hearing exactly what tens of thousands of the doomed heard, exactly what they heard, in exactly the same place, as they proceeded along this same road in this same spot, and maybe, as I looked down, as some of them probably did, back then, in that world that had come so completely off its rails, maybe I was seeing exactly what they saw, too, the snow and the gravel passing by my feet, not looking up because there was no point, since it was a crowd, and since, because of the others, you couldn’t really see where you were going, only the next step and the next, and the sound of snow under your feet, and, anyway, you can’t know what’s at the end of this long walk, you just have to think that whatever it is, you will cope with it when you get there, but it’s taking a long time, this walk…

This experience of this walk with my group, on this day in 2011, was a million miles away from what it much have actually been like to be there, then, at that time, but it is the closest I will ever come.

My throat is dry, my eyes begin to tear, and I have the thought to break away from the group, to sit for a while, to gather myself and maybe to find some resource with which to cope with a heart so heavy that it feels as if it won’t survive, but I don’t, I continue on in silence with my group, and it seems to take forever and the footsteps and the crunching in the snow seems to go on and on, but we proceed and we come closer and eventually we arrive at the end, at the spot where they had the four crematoria, the spot where more human beings were destroyed than anywhere else on Earth.

_______________________________________

The Heart of Darkness

If there is an epicenter to the heart of darkness, surely this is it. Surely, this is ground-zero, this spot, right…here. Not here, generally, this Auschwitz-Birkenau place, but here, specifically, by these fallen bricks where I’m sitting and where I can hear a soft breeze brushing through the trees behind me and where there is still the faint aroma of votive candles that have recently exhausted themselves, the flame gone, gone as surely as the loved ones or relatives or even distant, unmet but not forgotten kin who perished here by the… millions, and for whom the candles were so sadly and pathetically left, along with a name scratched on a shingle or a bouquet of flowers, tied carefully with a colored ribbon, left atop the stones, fading quickly in the cold.

The guide is gone, the sun is setting, the others have drifted away, and, for the first time today, I am finally allowed to be alone with my thoughts, as I sit here, here at the very home of the heart of darkness.

These are the remains of one of the four crematoria at the place where more people were deprived of their lives than any other place on the planet.

It gets no worse than this.

They did their best to destroy the evidence, and this is what is left.

The hooks I talked about above don’t exist anymore, and almost all the gas chambers and ovens are gone, and the changing rooms with the hooks are gone, only rubble now, because the Germans knew something that has been known for a long time, and that is that history is written by the victors, and they became aware at a certain point that they were not going to be the victors, no, most assuredly not, and we forget, sometimes, how close it was, for a very long time, and how it could have easily gone another way, and if it had, the history would be very different, but it didn’t, and the Germans came to understand that they were not going to write this history and sculpt for posterity the record of their deeds in ways that would seduce that posterity into seeing those odious acts as not that, as, instead, the efforts of the good people selected from a Good People to do what was necessary, to do this hard and distasteful task, this thankless but necessary

task of ridding the planet of particular types of human beings who were polluting the population to the detriment of all. No, the history would not be written as a flattering one; it would be written by the victors and it would not see these things the way the Germans saw them, and they would not depict them the way the Nazis would like them to be depicted. They would be written the way they really were, to a point, because, after all, the way it really was might not be something whose fundamental truth can ever be truly harnessed. We can only grasp at it at long reach and ponder the small bits of it that simply won’t fit themselves into a completed puzzle; we can only sit by these rocks in this place and try, out of respect and a desire to believe that there is some baseline thread of humanity that cannot be extinguished even by a place like this—try to think of individuals rather than millions, and when you do that it will make you understand, in part, perhaps not totally or even very much, but it will make you understand just a bit the authentic and odd purity despair.

And, finally, as I rise to make the long walk back, back to the bus yard and back to the 21st century, my knees ache from the cold, and I’m tired from the long day, and as I rise and take the first steps, I think of Baudelaire, and I think that he was right, this dissolute, tormented Frenchman, he was right when he said that the Devil’s greatest trick is convincing us that he doesn’t exist…

* * *

Coda:  An “Interest Group” that will surprise you

.

When you pass by a store selling Hugo Boss suits, and your eye is caught by a particularly nice design or fabric, is it important to know that Hugo Boss enthusiastically made the uniforms for the Nazi SS? Does it matter? Should it matter?

In German there is a long, unpronounceable word, Interessen-Gemeinschaft, that means, essentially, “Interest Group”. That’s not exact, but as a translation it has the felicitous effect of being shortened in both English and German—to “I.G.”

Hold that thought…

At the turn of the 20th century, there were a few companies competing with each other to make, of all things, dyes. You know: The various substances and concoctions that give fabrics and other things their colors. This is a messy business and, to do it well, you need to have a lot of folks around who understand chemistry. It also helps if they are really, really enthusiastic about all the things you can do with chemicals.

The word for “color” in German is “farbe”; dyes were called “farbestoff” (“colored things”); and these companies, all chemical companies at heart, of one sort or another, were each involved in making these dyes, these “Farben”.

All proceeding along on their merry but separate ways, they got wind of what was going on in America, with the conglomeration of companies into cooperative behemoths—very profitable ones—like US Steel, Standard Oil and General Motors, and they began to think maybe that was a concept they ought to look into. It seemed like minded companies doing similar things, or compatible things, could get together and, well, the whole could be greater than the sum of the parts.

So these German companies did get together—and you’re going to be surprised how well you know their names—and formed an “Interest Group” (I.G.) of dye producing companies (“Farben”), and became the quite notorious I.G. Farbenindustrie AG, more commonly known as, simply, IG Farben. During the years leading up to the war, they were the fourth largest company in the world.

There are several things to know about I.G. Farben and the companies that got together in cooperation to create it. First of all, they weren’t just into making dye. They branched out into a lot of other chemical-related things like rubber, synthetic fuel, photo film and pharmaceuticals. Their involvement in, and expertise at, that last one, pharmaceuticals—would turn out to be very unfortunate for a lot of people at Auschwitz.

The second most remarkable thing about the “interest group” known as I.G. Farben was their singular and enthusiastic connection to Germany’s National Socialist Party, otherwise known as the Nazis. It wasn’t just that they had a connection—a lot of companies had that—and it wasn’t just that they found ways to benefit from what the Nazi’s were doing anyway—a lot of other companies did that, too—and they didn’t just wholeheartedly take advantage of opportunities that opened up as a byproduct of the Nazis barreling along in their nasty business. Sure, they did that, seized those opportunities as they arose and as their “connections” would allow—but they, beyond any other company, did more:

I.G. Farben had so much influence and so much power that they could actually dictate to the Nazis certain behaviors, strategies and actions, designed to yield advantages and opportunities specifically and exclusively for the benefit of I.G. Farben. The Nazi’s didn’t have to guess which chemical factories in Czechoslovakia would be useful to I.G Farben—I.G Farben let them know. At the same time they let them know how grateful they would be if the attacking armies might be sure to include those particular plants in those particular areas for swift and complete occupation.

Thus, from a global business perspective, it gives one a distinct advantage if, in addition to the traditional methodology of acquiring other companies via offering its current ownership an attractive financial package to make it worthwhile for them to divest, one has also at one’s disposal the most powerful and brutal military machine on the planet that can be deployed to simply conquer its mother country, seize it and turn it over at no charge.

Another thing about this I.G. Farben “interest group”: Being in the chemical business and all, they also had some expertise in pesticides, one of which was a kind of cyanide. The name of this pesticide, utterly unremarkable at the time, would become known worldwide and forever: Zyklon B.

At first Zyklon B was used to de-lice and disinfect the clothing of arriving prisoners at the “relocation” camps that were blossoming all over Europe, but eventually it was found to be pretty good for—not great, because it really took too long to work its effect completely, but pretty good for—killing people. Hence, it was used as the primary agent to exterminate well over a million human beings, and very profitably, it must be said.

A good bit of this happened because the Nazis and the I.G. Farben executives decided it would be a fine idea, quite advantageous to all concerned, to create a mutually supportive combination of interests in a small, remote Polish town some distance from Krakow named Oświęcim. The Nazis would build a huge concentration camp—later to become a death camp (and, yes, the Nazi’s made the semantic differentiation, codified it and compartmentalized it)—while I.G. Farben would at the same time create a couple of factories to make rubber, synthetic fuel and all kinds of other things that would be useful for the war effort, which is what ginned up the Nazis, while being quite profitable for I.G. Farben as well, by virtue of greatly enhanced profit margins resulting from the very low labor costs, flowing, in turn, from the availability nearby of a slave labor pool whose expense consisted only of a tiny hourly wage paid not to the workers, but to the SS for delivering an endless supply. That town name, when Germanized, becomes “Auschwitz“.

Sadly, there was a bit of a problem, a bit of a conflict between the goal of the Nazis and the goal of I.G Farben who, on one issue, were working at cross purposes:

I.G Farben wanted cheap, effector labor. From their point of view, the object of the labor was to produce things as efficiently as possible, things which could then be sold.

For the Nazis, the purpose of labor was quite different, not in any way hard to understand, and clearly stated in surviving documents. For them, the point of labor was to induce death. The labor should be designed for the specific purpose of inducing death. If no legitimate tasks were available, then meaningless, back-breaking, pointless work should be concocted.

Not surprisingly, The I.G. Farben executives complained that the SS was delivering an inferior and ineffective workforce, one whose overriding characteristics were starvation and exhaustion.

Simply stated, the conflict was this:

I.G. Farben wanted the SS to be part of the industrial war machine. The SS wanted I.G Farben to be part of the killing machine.

The SS won, and the life-expectancy of a factory worker would become four months, unless they were assigned to the mines, in which case it was one month.

Death was the point.

Make no mistake. This is not surmise. The record is clear on I.G. Farben. There were post-war trials, and at least some went to jail, although not many. It’s complicated, and I won’t go into here the legitimate but ultimately beside-the-point argument that I.G. Farben was one of the first thoroughly “managed” companies, which meant that the owners of the company could argue that, really, they had nothing to do with what the managers were up to.  Whatever the case, whatever the excuses, I.G. Farben was as much a part of the Nazi effort as the Nazi’s themselves, and in some respects, worse. Those horrendous pharmaceutical experiments at Auschwitz on live subjects almost all of whom died horribly as a result, Dr. Mengele being only one of the many doctors who participated, was done under the direction of an I.G. Farben pharmaceutical division looking to shortcut what in our time is known as “clinical trials”. If they needed to kill a few thousand inmates in order to find a vaccine for Typhus as quickly as possible so that it could be used for the German soldiers, well, one could count one’s blessings that such human test subjects were readily available, no?

Birth control? The Nazis had had entire ethnic populations that they intended to sterilize, and no time to waste in figuring out how to do it efficiently. Again, the test subjects were available and, too, the trained professionals—from I.G. Farben.

I.G. Farben, started in 1925 when those six companies got together to form the “interest group”, a corporate name that might be the most reviled in all of recorded history, for good reason, no longer exists, any more than the Nazi party still exists.

Or does it?

Most people believe that the I.G. Farben company died with all the other appendages of the Third Reich, buried under the ashes and rubble of Nazi Germany, as surely as the streets of Dresden or the corpse of Hitler, but that’s not exactly the case…

I.G. Farben did what it did during the war, and then, afterwards, the six companies spun themselves out again, and some of these companies exist– and thrive– today.

Who on earth were these people?

Bayer. BASF. AGFA. Hoechst.

That’s right, the friendly aspirin people, and other companies that remain household names.

They don’t deny their involvement with I.G. Farben, if you ask, but you have to ask, maybe more than once. But they don’t talk about it, either, unless they have to, which is why most people have no idea, no idea at all, that these modern day companies have this Nazi past in their history, if not their DNA.

Things change. They evolve. As of 1999 Hoechst was sold off to several companies, much of it swallowed by Celanese.

There is a very strong impulse to rear back in righteousness and condemn these companies, thereby discounting and subsuming the good they do now, and the good they do now is considerable and undeniable. They all have strong cultures of philanthropy and community support; it is admirable and well-known. Bayer, as just one example (and there are hundreds), funds and supports over three hundred social responsibility programs worldwide.

What can we make of all this? What can be said of the hideous war record of Siemens AG. Its activities were so grotesque, pervasive and malevolent during WWII that Allied bombers purposely and with a vengeance destroyed 90% if its factories. Today, Siemens, a thriving, highly-regarded behemoth, employs over five hundred thousand people, all of whom are happy, no doubt, to have their jobs and none of whom, quite properly, needs to take on any responsibility at all for the behavior of their employer 65 years ago.

It makes you think of those sad and existentially mystifying cases where an otherwise “normal” and “good” person with, say, a long history of decency and charity and church going makes a horrible judgment to get behind the wheel of a car when they have had too much to drink, and, order to make it a little more understandable, let’s say it’s at the conclusion of joyous wedding, they get behind the wheel of a car and no-one makes them do it, they do it by choice, and then something horrible and dreadful and grisly happens and you know that from that moment forward, and forever, their lives will be completely defined by—will, in fact, exist as nothing more than—the worst thing they have ever done, and nothing else matters, all else is neutralized by the sheer enormity of this one utterly unforgivable and unredeemable act.

And yet…

Perhaps there is something else at work here, something ineffable, some metaphysical balance sheet of the type Abraham Lincoln seemed to be referring to in that greatest of all documents, the Second Inaugural Speech.

He was speaking of slavery but, really, it was about the cosmic accounting that might be incurred by acts of injustice. The Civil war had been dragging on for four years and the “butcher’s bill” was agonizing. If you know Lincoln at all, you know that his power of empathy, the amount he suffered as this horrible war, under his direction, continued, would cause him to feel a kind of pain that it is difficult to imagine anyone enduring. More than anything, he was tortured by a belief that the amount of death and agony being visited on the nation should not be required to accomplish the goal of keeping the union together. Why must this go on and on and on?

And then he said this, almost as if he was musing to himself, digging as deeply as he could into a chasm of unknowingness to speculate:

Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”

This sentence is an indulgence on Lincoln’s part. It serves no purpose; it changes nothing. It does not illuminate or augment anything that comes before or after. But it speaks with deep eloquence to the connection Lincoln felt to that which exists but is unknowable, that which we see only as if through glass darkly but which most assuredly will impose its metaphysical natural law, that, if defied or unattended to, will extract a counterweighing spiritual price, in ways we don’t expect, and in ways that might cause us to fail to see, or to miss-assign, its genesis.

And it is that metaphysical calculus, that accounting, that makes me wonder…

Can it be said that the butcher’s bill has been paid if the companies in charge of the abattoir continue on under another name?

Idle thoughts, these, and, ultimately, meaningless. They exist, these companies, they’re here, they do good things, and that’s what matters now, only that. And yet…

I was in the photo agency business for years. When I was just starting my company, many of the existing photo agencies had been founded in the 1930’s by European Jewish refugees or in the late 1940’s by survivors. Over time I got to know some of them well. With even more time, they came to trust me enough to tell their stories, to show me their tattoos, to show me, even, the soft, fragile cloth stars-of-David that they had been forced to wear and which they kept between the pages of bibles and diaries that they rarely looked at anymore, relics of a time they wished to forget…

In the photo business at that time, Kodak was king. Eventually, later on, Fuji would become important to professional photographers. But Agfa, too, was formidable, and there were those who argued that Agfa made the finest Black&White print paper you could get, by far, and if you wanted the best print, the very best, well, Agfa was the choice for the discerning, true professional.

As far as I know, none of these people who were my competitors and who had become my friends, and who had survived the worst the world has to offer, and who knew all about Agfa and its relationship to I.G. Farben, they knew even though I didn’t know and most of us didn’t know, but they knew, and none of them ever used an Agfa product, not ever, and, as far as I know, never let the name Agfa cross their lips.

* * *

The rubber factories and the chemical factories still exist, owned by Polish enterprises and provide good work for thousands, supporting the town, known again, as Oświęcim, where the past is very much the past and, for them, the townsfolk, Auschwitz-Birkenau is an unfortunate memory, one that includes the deaths of many local family members, non-Jews, but Poles that, for one reason or another, were deemed unworthy of life.

That Auschwitz-Birkenau is now a tourist mecca, attracting over a million visitors each year to this otherwise tiny, obscure village—does them no good, either. Once the tourists have seen the camps, they leave, that day, they get out, so there’s little need for hotels or restaurants or anything else.

No, the locals are simple people who live in a simple town and merely want to live out their lives in peace and maybe with a little bit of happiness and if they’re lucky someone to love and to love them back.

Really, that’s all anyone wants, including the millions who died here.

* * *

Epilogue

I have a recommendation for you, and it is about a piece of music: Mahler’s 10th symphony.

It is a symphony about acceptance, and its last movement is exquisite, unforgettably so.  In a way, it is strange that it should be so, because it is a symphony about about death–  and behind that, is a story:

Mahler’s genius consumed him and propelled him.  When he composed, he became obsessed and frenzied in ways that were convulsively unhealthy.  By that stage of his life he was sickly and had reached the point where his doctors were telling him that if he continued to compose, he could not physically stand it:  He would die.  The composing itself, the process, would kill him.

Unable to resist, and despite the warnings, he repaired to the forest and began to write what would be this, his last symphony–  “unfinished”, because in the end, it did kill him.

Since he was aware that the process of composing was inviting his own demise,  he had to know this would be his last one, his last symphony, and so it’s not surprising that the work itself is about death, his own death, and that the symphony would be, in effect, both the cause of that death– and the result.

Denial, anger, bargaining, depression and, finally, acceptance—Kubler-Ross’s “five stages of grief”:  There are those who insist that this 10th symphony clearly and methodically tracks the progression through each of those stages, if you listen attentively.  The “anger” passage, for example, is discomfiting and unnerving and brutally harsh; the ”depression” segment a painful emotional abyss.  But then…

Slowly, at the end, piece by piece, note by note, you are ushered calmly and confidently and even lovingly into… acceptance, and it is peaceful and serene and ineffable, and you feel you have arrived at a particular  kind of understanding, unfamiliar but profoundly welcome, that is inaccessible in any other way.  Somehow, it feels like home– and that you are floating somewhere safe, in a way that perhaps you have not understood safety in that emotional way before.

There have been times that I have recommended this piece of music to friends who were dying or who had suffered catastrophic losses, and they have told me they have found comfort, indescribably so.

* * *

I had been back in Luxembourg for ten days, but I could not stop thinking about Auschwitz, although those reflections lacked clarity, because I was becoming exhausted from it and dispirited, but I could not find a way to not think about it.  Illogically, I could not acccept that there was nothing that could be done, anymore, it couldn’t be stopped, because, of course, it happened decades ago, and nothing was going to change that, but, then, I couldn’t quel a sense of unspecific urgency, a feeling that something was happening and that it must be prevented, hindered, prohibited, or, at leat, impeded; that it is impossible to think that these things could remain anywhere, even in history:  Something must be done to go back and prevent it from happening, but, of course, that will never be possible, because it did happen– even though you can’t even fully grasp what it was– but it happened, and if only there were a way to make it not have happened…

We learned that the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra was giving a performance of Mahler’s 10th symphony, and I was amazed at this stroke of luck, because it had not occurred to me before we learned of this impending performance that maybe Mahler could help me with this, as he had with other difficult things, before, with his remarkable 10th symphony, the symnphony of  death, he symphony about acceptance.

So, on a cold January evening we drove the 20 kilometers to the lovely new concert hall in Luxembourg City, and, amidst the festive and well-heeled concert-goers, I sat and I listened, and I purposely thought about Auschwitz the entire time.  I let the stages of denial and anger and bargaining and depression wash over me and through me, and then, in the end, with a willful openness that felt like prayer, I waited patiently for the last movement of acceptance to take my hand and lead me toward stillness, to a place where I could live with the images of Auschwitz, images that will never leave me, to a spot where the thoughts and reflections and memories would be less consuming, less demanding, where they would let go, just enough– and it did just that. It helped me to accept the unacceptable, at least enough so that I could be released from its debilitating grip, to move forward, to be able to walk in the snow and not think only of the walk to the crematoria at Auschwitz, to be able to take pleasure in the simple act of patting my dog on his head without feeling, somehow, unentitled to even that, as if indulging in that small, pleasing gesture would somehow insult the memories of the unimaginable suffering of others.

It was a long, cold day I spent at Auschwitz, and it will never leave me, and it will never leave the world, which is good, and I have come to understand that part, the not leaving part, the always there part; and come to accept the part I cannot understand, the part that will never be truly understood by anyone—the part that I cannot change, not in history, not in the world, not in the most elusive corner of all, my own imagination.

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