70th International Holocaust Remembrance Day
January 27 is
the International Holocaust Remembrance Day - observed each year to commemorate
the victims of the concentration camps - to remind us of the horror
that had been made a way of life for millions in some 300 concentration camps
in Germany or in German occupied territories.
Some 7 million
of these many millions were killed in these forced labour camps that also
doubled as death factories, the so-called extermination camps - employing death
as a tool to intimidate, to propagate, to indoctrinate, to manipulate humans into
soulless creatures and to kill - randomly, systematically, methodically.
In these death
camps, fellow human lives were made objects of derision, subjects of sadistic
pleasures, trophies of 'shoot at will' shootouts and raw material for German
industries. Including children, they were mere subjects for dangerous
scientific experiments.
The Germans of
Nazi Germany mastered their ways to quench their thirst and lust for human
blood my bringing mass murder machines and technology - gas chambers coupled
with electric crematoria to these camps.
The highly
organized machinery to exact the 'cleansing' as forced by Adolf Hitler and his
band had set targets to kill 'minimum this many' on a day.
In these camps,
the human subjects, were pushed to such extremes that they had forgotten what a
human life was, what life they had lived some years ago - to accept a lowly
life subservient to the whims of the masters of the so-called superior race who
lorded over them in the camps - to follow a life where they did not have
relations, no sons, no daughters, no wives, no husbands - to live a life
without expressing hunger (starving to death was strictly practiced, even
children were not spared), love, pain and suffering - to become fearful animals
living always in the shadow of death - to the extent that death became the only
liberator.
The methodical
process in these camps began with the basics - by wiping out names replacing
them with numbers and thus eliminating existences - and went to the satanic
levels of corrupting human minds where a brother would kill a brother for a
loaf of bread or a piece of cloth.
On January 27,
1945, the largest of these, Auschwitz II - Birkenau, was liberated by the
Allied Forces.
Estimates say
some four millions lives were annihilated at Auschwitz.
Today is the
70th anniversary when the killing machinery at Auschwitz was finally shut - but
with multitudes who were still dying.
The scale of
human debasement and the loss of human lives in these camps are so beyond human
history and are so shocking that even the 700th anniversary would need us to
react in the same way as we react today, as humanity reacted when it came to
know the reality of these barbed-wire camps, as the Allied Forces set on
liberating them - piled up human carcasses, in mounds of thousands, charred
corpses, starved, skeletal survivors who had gone beyond such thoughts that if
they were sleeping in a room full of dead or if they were having no clothes on
their bodies.
They were just
bones, frail bones, irrespective of the age-group. The flesh was the first
thing that Hitler's soldiers chopped from inmates' bodies to stuff their platters.
What happened
then, in these concentration camps - must never be forgotten - because it is
important for us to remain 'us', the human-beings - the first and the foremost
principle of being a human - to see others as 'as equal human beings as we are'.
It is important
for humanity to revisit these images - again and again - randomly and regularly.
It is important
that generations to come have access to these images to know how devil human
thinking can become and what it takes when it gets to that.
Holocaust
literature, Holocaust documentaries, Holocaust TV shows, Holocaust movies and
Holocaust related events like this must be made important elements of 'exposure
to history' for everyone in every society.
There are documents.
There are enactments. And in good numbers.
But the most
important are the tales of survivors, the books by them and the books on them,
and the images of the camps, still and moving. In case of images, we need to
rely mostly on visuals shot by the Allied Forces.
Though marred by
geopolitical compulsions, some of the real footage of the concentration camps
as the Allied Forced were liberating one after the other, have found their way into
the public domain.
But the larger
part of the thousands of hours of footage is still lying in archives. It is
needed to be taken out and put in public domain.
And there is some
positive news on this. An important project that was shelved after some months
into making in 1945 on 'factual survey of the concentration camps', the most
direct and detailed one, has seen some restoration and release of some of its
footage after 70 years with the documentary 'Night Will Fall'.
The documentary,
with so-far unseen footage, including of Auschwitz, reflects on the efforts to shoot
and record the concentration camps by the British government with the movie
project 'German Concentration Camps Factual Survey' that was never completed
though some related footage was available with 'Memory of the Camps' and some
other productions.
Image courtesy:
Collage prepared from images sourced from online resources