Auschwitz and the duty of memory

The scale of the horrors that occurred at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Nazi concentration and extermination camp, is almost impossible to grasp. Located in occupied Poland and operational from May 1940 to January 1945, the work and extermination center received more than 1.3 million people through its gates. Nearly 1.1 million were Jews. The rest were predominately Polish political prisoners, followed by persons identified as Roma, Soviet prisoners of war, other ethnic and religious minorities, and homosexuals. A low-ball estimate of the death toll is upward of 1.2 million souls, mostly Jews.

Victims were murdered by starvation, exhausting work, summary execution, torture, disease, pseudo-scientific experiments, and systematic gassing. At the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, an effort was made to read the names of all those murdered there. At the time, I estimated that the macabre litany was being recited at the pace of one name per second. Imagining that we had the names of all the dead—a counterfactual—it would have taken nearly 13.8 days to read the entire list.

Monday marked the 80th anniversary of the end of Auschwitz. But the hard task of properly remembering that ghastly place is only now beginning in earnest.

Remembrance has always been important, of course, not least because it has also always been politically fraught. From the very beginning, debates over how to remember Auschwitz have been waged by different religious groups—especially Christians and Jews, historians with competing agendas, and various nationalist and other special-interest groups that insist there is an overemphasis on Jewish victims.

But now there is a more immediate concern, for this present anniversary surely marks the last major one at which there will be any remaining living Holocaust survivors. Very soon, the burden of remembering Auschwitz will be placed entirely on next-generation witnesses—those who did not themselves experience the horrors of the camps but who have committed to keeping those experiences alive. In an increasingly secular culture, Christians must be counted among the burden-bearers.

One reason is that as our culture continues to renounce its Hebraic inheritance, we are in greater and greater need of tangible points of reference that alert us not only to the way things are but also to the way things ought to be. Auschwitz will be chief among those reference points.

As C.S. Lewis said of war, so might we say of the death camp: “We see unmistakably the sort of universe in which we have all along been living, and must come to terms with it. If we had foolish unchristian hopes about human culture, they are now shattered. If we thought we were building up a heaven on earth, if we looked for something that would turn the present world from a place of pilgrimage into a permanent city satisfying the soul … we are disillusioned, and not a moment too soon.”

This signals a double demand. First, if Auschwitz reminds us of the brevity of human life and the inadequacy of our world-centered schemes toward happiness, it also reminds us of the importance of living in the hope of the Resurrection and the final judgment of God. At the same time, we are reminded of our present responsibility. Auschwitz reminds us why we need good men skilled in war. Christian moral doctrines such as just war remind us how to fight those just fights justly.

Taken together, these demands signal a third. The late Fred Rogers often remarked that when he was a boy and saw scary things in the news, his mother would say to him, “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.”

But many Holocaust scholars insist traditional moral language is insufficient—even inappropriate—when confronting a place like Auschwitz. For instance, they stress, Auschwitz’s survival was a question only of brute chance set within a series of impossible choices that cannot fit within simple conceptions about right and wrong. There is truth to this. But they carry it too far when they, therefore, assert the impossibility of both properly remembering Auschwitz and of trying to make moral judgments or find heroes, martyrs, or anything else that might hint at a redemptive or consoling break in the malevolent clouds. To look for goodness in a place like Auschwitz, they say, is to muddy the terrible truth.

But the problem is that goodness did happen there. Christians should proclaim the names of those like Oskar Schindler, Maximilian Kolbe, and Gino Bartoli. They should remember the Jews who remained faithful to God and neighbor even in that seemingly godforsaken place. Remembering such as these does not exonerate the monsters, collaborators, or bystanders. If anything, it condemns them further. If some could resist, why not others?

Auschwitz reminds us that there is both shame and honor in being sons and daughters of Adam and Eve. On this anniversary—and every day forward—Christians should bear faithful witness to that truth. We cannot afford to forget Auschwitz.