Miami Herald commentary: Death camp visit shows the worst of humanity
My response was printed on the Miami Herald website.
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BY LEONARD PITTS, lpitts@herald.com
KRAKOW, Poland -- The concentration camp is around the corner from a McDonald's. It is up the hill from a Shell station and next door to an apartment complex.
Plaszow -- that's the name of it -- was immortalized in Schindler's List. Oskar Schindler plucked hundreds of doomed Jews from this place and gave them shelter in his factory. If you saw the movie, you remember the house from which commandant Amon Goeth shot Jews for target practice. It's still here. Standing near it, you can hear the squeal of children in the apartment house playground.
I don't know what I expected a concentration camp to be when I joined 24 other people on this ''interfaith pilgrimage'' to Polish Holocaust sites, but I didn't expect this. I didn't expect the place where human beings were enslaved, tortured and killed to be within sight of a warehouse superstore.
I ask our guide, Chris Huszczanowski, if all this development around the camp is new, something that has happened since the war. No, he says. This was always an urban area.
I had supposed a murder camp would be far from civilization, tucked into some dark, wooded place where its grisly business could be conducted in secrecy. It's a misconception that is, I now realize, first cousin to a misconception many Americans have about the lynchings of African Americans in the years between the Civil War and the civil rights movement. Many of us imagine those killings to have been done in shadow by a few depraved individuals. But the truth is, they were promoted by newspapers, memorialized by photographers and attended by women, children and men who acted as if they were going to the county fair.
In other words, people knew.
The same is true of the Polish people and the murdered Jews. How could they not know? The main camp of Auschwitz is across the street from a strip mall. From the guard tower at Auschwitz-Birkenau, you can see private homes. Majdanek is on a busy street, Belzec in a residential neighborhood. It is said that during the war, a little boy climbed a tree overlooking Belzec and drew ghastly, ghostly pictures of what he saw.
''It's such a funny thing,'' says Joe Engel, a 77-year-old Holocaust survivor who is with the pilgrimage group. ``People say they didn't know. All the camps were so close to the city. How could they not know? You could smell the ashes, the flesh.''
At this point, the people of Poland would want you to know a couple of things. The first is that they were a conquered nation. These camps were set up on Polish soil, yes. But they were set up by Germans. The second is that many Poles risked fortune and life to help the Jews. Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust education and commemoration group, maintains a list -- The Righteous Among Nations -- of non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews. More than a quarter of the 20,757 now on the list were Polish, a higher proportion than from any other nation. All this is a matter of record.
But it is also a matter of record that many Poles collaborated, cooperated, pretended not to see, betrayed runaway Jews, happily joined in acts of mass murder.
Still, the question here isn't, ''What's wrong with them?'' It is, rather, ``What's wrong with us?''
Because this is not a Polish failing, but a human one. What is it about seeing some poor and bedraggled Other being mistreated that brings out the beast in us? Why does cruelty so readily beget more cruelty? How is it that the barbarism of others so readily gives license to our own worst impulses, so rarely encourages our best?
You always like to think you would do better somehow, do the right thing, regardless.
To be here is to question that smug assurance. It is to wonder: Who would I really be in the moment of decision? Would I be who I've always hoped, someone large and brave? Or would I be someone smaller, more niggardly and scared?
To be here is to realize that you don't know. And to hope you never learn.
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