‘Who will say Kaddish for me?’ – remember, lest we ever forget.

Last October on a bracing sunny day I had the privilege, as distinct from the pleasure, of visiting Auschwitz concentration camp on the outskirts of Krakow in Poland, where more than a million Jewish men, women and children were murdered as part of Nazi Germany’s ‘final solution’ to the Jewish question.
A guide brought us through the remains of the camp. His dead-pan, understated commentary set in relief the horror of what happened there. He explained in detail the process by which Jews were rounded up, in Hungary for example, promised a new and better life, loaded into railway carriages used to transport cattle, given no food and no water and brought hundreds of miles across Europe to the ‘terminal’ at Auschwitz where German doctors including the infamous Dr. Mengele, separated them on the platform into two groups: those strong enough to carry out the necessary work of the camp; and the rest, those who were brought to the gas chambers.
Those destined for a quick death had their hair shorn (to become part of a carpet-making enterprise), any gold in their teeth pulled forcibly out, their clothes taken from them as naked they were ushered into a chamber, presuming what they faced was a communal shower when, to their horror, they heard the gas entering the enclosed area where they died within minutes. Their bodies were then removed and piled into incinerators as the putrid smell of burning flesh enveloped the area.
The guide brought us to rooms filled with thousands of shoes, thousands of glasses and a mound of human hair, stark reminders of what remained of the lives of over a million Jews. He explained in graphic detail the exploitation, torture, abuse that ravaged the lives of those deemed fit and strong enough to be forced to help operate the camp. The walls of one room were covered with pictures of individual with the abbreviated details of their lives, giving a sense of the personal stories behind the mountain of statistics.
The guide’s words were received in complete silence, even by a group of teenagers on a school trip who might be expected to be their usual boisterous selves. Because silence was the only response as the ‘story’ of Auschwitz was translated for us before our eyes from the cold details of the pages history book or classroom to the elemental horror of what it actually meant for those who lived and died in Auschwitz.
Last week the world remembered that horror on Holocaust Memorial Day, as the world marked the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Survivors of the camp gathered in a snow-covered landscape for a ceremony of remembrance and around the world television programmes sought to give the occasion its due, notably BBC television, as ever striking the right notes.
At the end the Chief Rabbi prayed the Kaddish, the Jewish Prayer for the dead. It brought back memories of the Nobel Peace Prize winner, Elie Wiesel, speaking so movingly of those going to the death-chambers in Auschwitz asking: ‘Who will say Kaddish for me?’
Usually there is someone to stand at a grave to observe the formal religious rituals but for the dying of Auschwitz there was only the death-sound of the gas in the shower room of the crematorium to accompany the gruesome endings.
Even secular Jews, those with no religious faith (like secular Irish ‘Catholics’ not fully immune to the value of Catholic death-rituals) would want their passing to be marked in some formal way.
Standing outside the camp, after having my mind dipped in the reality behind the grim Auschwitz statistics, my first thought was to get as far and as fast as I could from the heretofore unimaginable horror of the gas chambers and the cold and calculated factory of death devised by the Nazi in humankind’s greatest ever atrocity.
It was so difficult to comprehend this infamous example of man’s inhumanity to man that the temptation was to file it away undisturbed in the recesses of the mind.
Yet the reality is that versions of Auschwitz recur again and again in human history, from the sixth century B.C. when, during the Babylonian Exile, the Jews ‘sat and wept remembering Zion’ to the more recent ‘solution’ deployed by Milosevic and Karadzic and the Serbs against Muslims and Croatians in Yugoslavia.
Forgetting or allowing time to diminish the significance of Auschwitz is not an option. Remembering is a human and historical imperative.
Part of our group included a number of Germans who had resisted for years making a pilgrimage to Auschwitz. It was for everyone an uncomfortable experience but for Germans especially so. It has haunted, and still haunts, a nation that recovered dramatically from two world wars but still can’t get its collective mind around its extermination of six million Jews.
The temptation for the Germans is to try and spread the responsibility, to dissipate their ownership of the horror by arguing that humankind in general should shoulder the blame.
The temptation for the rest of us is to imagine that no possible combination of circumstances could conspire to bring you or me down that road, to find us participating in or ever justifying in what was so clearly immoral or unacceptable.
Trying to come to terms with the reality of places like Auschwitz is about recognizing the limitations of a world and a humanity where, in William Butler Yeats’ words, the best ‘lack all conviction’ while the worst are ‘full of passionate intensity’.
Recognising too that wherever enormous atrocities take place ­- in a world war or in a concentration camp – the ground is hallowed by suffering and death. It’s why Gettysburg is forever special to Americans and Calvary to Christians. Places become sacred as remembering becomes an imperative and not an option.
It was wonderful to see groups of young people visiting Auschwitz, future citizens of a world with so many competing ideologies. Wouldn’t it be wonderful too if, as well as going on pilgrimage to Lourdes, Fatima, Medjugorje and Taize, the young particularly were to visit that shrine we call Auschwitz, that place made sacred by the blood of over one million innocent men, women and children?
We may not like going to places like Auschwitz but we need to go. To remember lest we might ever forget.