"What has happenEd to us?"
For the 73rd anniversary of the liberation of the German Nazi Auschwitz camp the Director of the Memorial wrote an article that was published in many European newspapers.
The text appeared in printed or/and online version of the following newspapers: "Le Soir" (Belgium), "Hospodárské noviny" (Czechia), "Le Monde" (France), "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung" (Germany), "Népszava" (Hungary), "Haaretz" (Israel), "La Repubblica" (Italy), "Gazeta Wyborcza" (Poland) "Kommiersant" (Russia), "SME" (Slovakia), "El Pais" (Spain), "La Liberté" (Switzerland) and "Népszava" (Hungary).
Dr. Piotr M. A. Cywiński
73 years ago, the remaining seven thousand KL Auschwitz prisoners were liberated by the Red Army. Right before their escape, the Germans blew up the gas chambers and crematoria which were still operational. They managed to evacuate over 100,000 prisoners deep into Germany in order to continue using them as a slave labour force. Those who survived spent all their lives as witnesses for those who perished.
Today, Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, Władysław Bartoszewski, Israel Gutman, Simone Veil, Imre Kertesz and many others are no longer among the living. We, the post-war generation, remain more and more lonesome with the burden of their experience and it would be difficult to deny that we are still unable to manage this burden properly. And I am not referring to facts here. The entire modern world is now living more and more as if they have not learned much from the tragedy of the Shoah and the concentration camps.
And the entire world was supposed to look different after the war. Dialogue and co-operation institutions, such as the United Nations, were being built on a global scale. In Western Europe the process of the states, nations and societies coming together developed to a great extent, and it is now known as the European Union. This organism was created in place of past models of co-existence formed around the illusive balance of power, and made the co-operation and developing interdependence of its member states its main foundations.
New legal frameworks of crimes against humanity were accepted and the UN drew up a definition of the crime of genocide. The role of non-governmental organizations was appreciated and their full expansion after the war enhanced the influence of civil society on governmental institutions. The shape of those self-styled social structures no longer imitated the paramilitary culture that was so common before the war among different kinds of brotherhoods, corporations and associations.
The Church and other religious organizations felt the new spirit of ecumenism. After the war, it seemed that the world would have to be re-thought. Due to the tragedy of the loss of so many civilians, this war was not like any other war. Auschwitz became its most prominent symbol.
But at the time, there was not enough courage for real justice. Among approximately 70,000 SS men working in concentration and extermination camps, only about 1,650 were punished after the war. Furthermore, the punishment was, in the majority of cases, irritatingly and obviously not enough – a few years of imprisonment, often suspended. It should thus not surprise anybody that many of them later shared the feeling of impunity…