The infamous Arbeit Macht Frei (work will make you free) sign over the main gate of the original Auschwitz camp has, it appears this morning, been found in Poland. It had been reported stolen over the weekend. As far as police have determined at this point, the thieves were thinking about money, not politics. They aren’t neo-Nazis, anti-Semites or Holocaust deniers; they just wanted to make a buck and thought that working for it was too much trouble.
Regular readers of this blog know I visited Auschwitz some twenty years ago; it was there, at the site commemorating the execution of the camp’s commandant, that I realized that I don’t oppose capital punishment on principle. I’m glad they hanged him and I only hope that before he died he acquired some insight into the enormity of what he had done.
In those days the grip of Communism on Polish life was slowly thawing; the freeze was still on at Auschwitz, where the old communist order was still running the camp. It wasn’t quite as egregious as the communist presentation of Buchenwald near Weimar in what was then still East Germany. There the communist propaganda was as inescapable as it was incredible. My favorite was the proclamation from the communist mayor of Weimar hailing the “well known” spirit of restraint and order that marked the Soviet occupation of the region in 1945. (For those who don’t know the history, the Soviets, though nowhere near as brutal as the Wehrmacht on Soviet territory, rather famously raped and looted their way across the Reich, and random group rapes of German women continued for many months after the fighting stopped. Germany 1945 by Richard Bessel has the full story.) It’s hard to know who they thought the German-language sign was fooling; practically everyone who visited would have known the real story from family and friends.
The communist role at Auschwitz was mainly demonstrated by the poor quality of the visitor’s cafeteria and book store, and I found myself wondering queasily what capitalism would do with the gift shop at Auschwitz. And it was hard to complain about the greasy, heavy food in the cafeteria: “The food at Auschwitz was terrible” is possibly the whiniest and least appropriate comment the human tongue can make.
Possibly because they were demoralized by the coming political changes, the administrators of the camp were unbelievably lax. Visitors could and did climb up on the roof of the small death chamber by the headquarters, pull up a small section of the roof and peer down to the cubbyhole in which the Nazis would place the poison gas. It was the Disneyland of Hell; the different buildings had everything from the crematoria where the bodies were burned to the spectacles, shoes, clothes and color-sorted piles of women’s hair taken from the bodies.
The whole question of Holocaust tourism is a difficult one; on the one hand one wants to see and thinks the rising generations should know. On the other — there is such a thing as obscenity. A German satirical magazine issue once carried a cover that raised the right questions: it depicted a future Dachau Day parade, as prosperous, smug burghers celebrated 700 years of tourism at the Dachau camp in the then-West Germany. I haven’t been back to Auschwitz since 1990, but I understand that Auschwitz tourism is a linchpin of the regional economy; the tour buses pull in non stop.
The thieves weren’t all wrong; there are collectors who would pay a lot of money for the Arbeit sign.
Anyway, I learned something else about myself at Auschwitz. As I wandered through the appalling but somehow irresistible sights of the place, I saw an Israeli flag at the front of a group of kids. I went over to see what this was about, and found it was a group of Israeli kids on a tour of Poland, the country that for many centuries was a major center of Jewish life. “How was your trip?” I asked.
“Well,” one of the high school students answered, “it’s been pretty good, but we’ve had some difficult times.”
“Like what?”
They’d been visiting the memorial in Warsaw to the Jewish ghetto, most of whose residents had been murdered in places like Auschwitz during the war, and where the city’s Jews made their last stand in the most spectacular act of Jewish resistance to the Nazis. “We were laying a wreath,” the kid told me, “and some of the Polish kids standing by started to shout at us and threw stones.”
“What were they shouting?”
“Jews go home!”
That’s when I knew for sure that I was a Zionist for reasons that have nothing to do with holy books and end time prophecies. Many of these Jewish kids were descended from Polish Jews who emigrated to Palestine before the war or from the handful of survivors who, attempting to return to their homes across Poland, were driven away once again by angry mobs. Like everybody else in the world, Jews need what Robert Frost meant by home: the place where when you have to go there, they have to take you in.
Had I been ruling the world in 1945 I might have put that home in Germany somewhere, but in the absence of a time machine, the only place for the Jewish National Home is the place where that home now exists: Israel.
That doesn’t mean I have the answer to the Middle East problem. Palestinians are people too, and they also need a homeland and, as I’ve written in Foreign Affairs, the world has more homework to do before the Palestinian Question can be fairly and fully answered.
The problem isn’t a simple one and the question of fairness is more complicated than people often think. Many times Arabs have said to me that it is unfair that Arabs have had to pay the price for Europe’s mistreatment of the Jews. Yes, but roughly half of Israel’s Jewish population today is descended from people who fled there from Arab and Muslim countries, often driven out when local Arabs attacked their Jewish neighbors because they were angry at the Jewish state far away. Israel today, whatever its faults and its policy mistakes, is a refuge for both European and Middle Eastern Jews — and there is no doubt in my mind that they need it.