With fewer voices, Auschwitz survivors speak

January 24, 2015 7:50 PM

The voices of Auschwitz. "The 70th anniversary of the liberation of the notorious Nazi concentration camp could mark the last major commemoration for many Holocaust survivors."

Video: The Holocaust’s last voices

Photos: Auschwitz survivors - 70 years on

The remnants of Auschwitz’s dark history

Auschwitz's forbidden art

posted by homunculus (16 comments total)

The more these stories are given a human face, and voices that may not have been heard widely before (or at all before) get heard the better off we all are - time is running out to gather these.

If you search for "holocaust survivor stories" on youtube, some of the first results you will get are Holocaust denial films that splice together survivor stories that attempt to make out concentration camps as a "lie" or, even more offensive in some ways, resort-like. It's profoundly disgusting.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 8:45 PM on January 24, 2015 [4 favorites]

There has to be a point when we all let the bright light in and let this disaster go.

It's not now.
posted by Samuel Farrow at 9:43 PM on January 24, 2015 [1 favorite]

There has to be a point when we all let the bright light in and let this disaster go.

Survivor stories are a ray of bright light, it seems to me. People who survived atrocities but were left with their humanity somehow intact. It beggars belief, but at the same time, there it is.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 10:02 PM on January 24, 2015 [13 favorites]

Survivor stories are a ray of bright light, it seems to me. People who survived atrocities but were left with their humanity somehow intact.

Exhibit A for that idea (which I agree with): Auschwitz survivor Viktor Frankl, and his book Man’s Search for Meaning.
posted by LeLiLo at 10:22 PM on January 24, 2015 [8 favorites]

Voice/Vision holocaust survivor oral history archive.
posted by clavdivs at 11:21 PM on January 24, 2015 [1 favorite]

When I visited Dachau there was an old man sitting in the grounds who turned out to be a survivor from the camp. He said he went there a few times a week to sit and talk to visitors about his story. I can't imagine wanting to keep reliving it like that, but for the sake of those of us who want to learn, I'mglad some people do.
posted by lollusc at 12:14 AM on January 25, 2015 [3 favorites]

There has to be a point when we all let the bright light in and let this disaster go.

That's not going to happen--that can't happen--until the last denialist draws their last breath.

And a new one is always going to be born. This tragedy must be with us, the memory of it must be kept alive, until humanity reaches a collective point where it truly cannot happen again. I'm not particularly sanguine that point can ever be reached.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 5:55 AM on January 25, 2015

Growing up in temple, I took comfort in knowing and spending time with survivors as a child because we were taught that they and their accounts were our protection.

There's some part in the back of my head that fears the passing of the last of them, as it feels like losing a layer of security.
posted by sourwookie at 6:29 AM on January 25, 2015 [7 favorites]

I think humanity will always need to hear these stories-- stories of what happens when ignorance, cruelty, and disregard for human welfare reign. Each new generation will need to know this and guard with everything inside them against letting themselves become an agent of such horrible suffering whether deliberately or inadvertently.
posted by xarnop at 7:36 AM on January 25, 2015

Each new generation will need to know this and guard with everything inside them against letting themselves become an agent of such horrible suffering whether deliberately or inadvertently.

..so if torture has been committed in our name, maybe we should be getting on that soon, before the people who ordered are all into their 90s.
posted by bonobothegreat at 8:33 AM on January 25, 2015 [3 favorites]

There has to be a point when we all let the bright light in and let this disaster go.

It's not now.

I don't understand why there "has to be" any such thing. Will there ever come a day when these lives become meaningless? Will we ever reach a state where we don't value human lives, mourn those that are lost, and condemn torture and hate?

I hope we never reach such a point. Holocaust remembrance isn't just about safeguarding future generations from atrocities. It's also about honor and respect and humanism. I find it very weird to idealize a future in which we have evolved to a point of forgetting the dead.
posted by telegraph at 8:54 AM on January 25, 2015 [2 favorites]

The text says nothing of this, but the portraits in the "forbidden art" link appear to be all men bearing pink triangles; were they gay? Certainly adds another layer of meaning to the portraits.

Thanks for the post... I fear the loss of living witnesses. Humans have alarmingly short memories sometimes.
posted by kinnakeet at 4:27 PM on January 25, 2015

Or perceived to be gay, that's usually what the pink triangles meant.

I'm dismayed by how many gay men don't really get where the pink triangle comes from and why it's such a necessary symbol to keep alive.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 4:49 PM on January 25, 2015

Goldhagen in The New York Times: How Auschwitz Is Misunderstood

[...] it was a microcosm, not so much of the specific mechanisms of the Holocaust, but of the Nazis’ ideological vision of a world to be ruled by a master race, resting on the collective graves of the Jewish people and of tens of millions of additional victims the Germans deemed demographically expendable, and served by an enormous population of slaves. It reveals that during the Holocaust, mass annihilation, as genocide always is, was part of a larger eliminationist agenda and, at its core, a mechanism for social and political transformation.

posted by Joe in Australia at 3:59 AM on January 26, 2015 [1 favorite]

Hugo Rifkind:

Don’t start talking about the Middle East just because it’s Holocaust Memorial Day. This is all I ask. Whatever you think of the Middle East, just don’t. Talk about something else.

Talk about Auschwitz, maybe. Talk about a space which is probably bigger than any open space you have ever seen, unless you have been to Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. Imagine it being cleared - from farmland, from forest, from everything - in order to create a place to kill. Imagine the laying of the railway, which comes in, and then stops. This is the end of the line. Talk about the people who alighted from trains there. Talk about where they got on the trains, and who told them to. Once, they were like anybody else. Then they were here, for this, at the end of the line. Talk about all that had happened to them before, and how many people it took to make it all happen.

posted by Joe in Australia at 3:10 PM on January 26, 2015 [1 favorite]

The text says nothing of this, but the portraits in the "forbidden art" link appear to be all men bearing pink triangles; were they gay?

Actually, it's far more likely that these were red triangles indicating that, like the artist, these people were political prisoners.
posted by Dreadnought at 8:07 PM on January 26, 2015