A 70-year-old message

Bedrock of hatred, intolerance that underpinned places like Auschwitz has not gone away, its alive & well in Pakistan

Zakopane… a picturesque little town at the foot of the Tatra Mountains in Poland and it is Christmas, 1990. An old mate and I used to escape the madness of Christmas in the UK in those days, and take ourselves off for a week somewhere cold, snowy and good to look at in Eastern Europe.

Along with the holiday came packages, trips here and there to places of interest and our ever-helpful tour guide appeared one evening and announced that there was to be a trip to Auschwitz the next morning, warning that it was a long bus ride and thus an early start. There were about 40 in the group and half of us signed up. Little did we know what we were in for.

Auschwitz. A word from the history books synonymous with horror and the Holocaust. A place where the Nazis had killed 1.1 million people in an industrialised process over several years. Mostly they were European Jews, but gay men and women, gypsies and the mentally handicapped were all brought here to have their bodies harvested for work if they were able, and their hair, spectacles, gold teeth fillings and body fat to be rendered into soap if they were not fit to work. They were killed in bunkers by having a gas called Zyklon B pumped in, and then incinerated in vast crematoria and their ashes finally disposed of in a large pond to the north of the camp.

For those interested, go to Google Earth and search for ‘Oswiecim’ the town nearest to the camp and there it is, neat lines of elongated rectangles that were the accommodation, the administrative blocks, The Ramp where the trains bearing those soon to die arrived and were sorted. All very orderly.

Nothing prepares you for the feeling of cold and inner terror that comes over you as you walk through the main gates of the camp. The guides, mostly local women, said that some people just fell over and got no further than the gate. We walked in silence mostly, through rooms that were thick with death and its imagery. We stood at the top of the ramp that led down into the gas chamber. There was a Jewish man and his young son in our party. The group was hesitant, the visit to the gas chamber was ‘optional’ said the guide. You do not have to go in if you do not want to. The Jewish man turned to us and said, “Let me go first.” And holding his son’s hand he walked into a place where the very air screamed.

Auschwitz was liberated by the Russians on January 27, 1945, 70 years ago this week. It came into being because it was state policy to exterminate — literally completely wipe out — certain groups of people who were defined by law. They were to be wiped from the face of the earth, all trace of them removed. Institutionalised mass murder given the grace of legality. There were similar camps with the same purpose built in Germany and other parts of Poland. There was little or no protest among the population of either Germany or Poland, nobody raised a voice, few raised a questioning hand, and the butchery went on until the end of the war when the vast scale of it was revealed.

The bedrock of hatred and intolerance that underpinned places like Auschwitz has not gone away and it is alive and well in Pakistan. Although there is no state policy of extermination of a minority, there is a constitutional amendment that discriminates against a minority group. A minority group that is regularly targeted by terrorists who are rarely caught or prosecuted and whose actions have the unspoken support of many, perhaps millions. Many of that group have fled abroad, as have members of other minority groups including members of my own family.

There are no gas chambers in Pakistan, no crematoria where living people may be thrust into the fire. But there are brick kilns. Most Germans looked the other way as the Holocaust burned around them, closed their ears to the screams. Do you hear any screams, Dear Reader? No? Well I do.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 29^th,  2015.

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