12 January 2005

ARBEIT MACHT FREI   The liberation of the Nazi concentration camps began 60 years ago.  As the Allied forces closed in on the Third Reich from East & West, the ultimate practical manifestation of the philosophy of National Socialism became apparent & the trauma of the Holocaust was shared with the world.  As the swastika stands as the dark icon of the 20th century – a symbol unambiguous in terms of what it signifies – so the Holocaust has set the paradigm for the application of systematic, ordered, dispassionate evil.  There have been many examples of genocide from around the world during the past 60 years that have beggared the imagination & sickened the soul.  But it is the Nazi Holocaust that continues to supply the inexhaustible source for all who seek to examine what lies at the very edge of humanity.   A series began on BBC television last night.  It’s called Auschwitz: the Nazis & the Final Solution.  Its purpose is to scrutinise in forensic detail what forces had to come to together to make the concept of Auschwitz first a possibility & then a fully functioning & sustained reality.   The point is, of course, that for that actuality to be made manifest, responsibility must be seen to extend far beyond the initial actions of the creators.  The machinery that powered the work of Auschwitz & the other extermination camps was highly complex & the hierarchy of operations involved was extremely sophisticated.  For the lofty ambitions of Heinrich Himmler & Rheinhardt Heydrich to be translated into daily routine, a vast army of ordinary men & women had to be pressed into service.  These drones were not sadists or degenerates drawn from the recidivist criminal classes. They were the clerks and cooks and electricians and carpenters and builders and nurses who, by quirk of time & place, might have found themselves comfortably ensconced in offices, kitchens, yards, hospitals serving the Hamburg dockyards or the Essen steelworks.      Episode by episode, bit by bit, the series is likely to bring home to the viewer that, in another time & in another place, he or she might have become a small but integral moving part in that intricate & deadly machine.  And the question that will hang in the air in the wake of the final instalment will be: ‘Would I have known to what end my labours were being directed? And, if I had known, would I have withdrawn those labours?’ ARTEFACTS   There is the heaped equality of spectacles, the comfort of linked arms - wire, gold and tortoiseshell, the white opacity of the tilted lens.   There is the kicking scramble of empty shoes, piled like bean pods, shelled of movement, scuffed and dusty from the longest walk in the world.   There is the hollow clothing, the empty-handed gloves, the headless hats and cap, the hanks of hair, bagged, sprung teeth in boxes, stamped and labelled.   Bones we know; we scramble up and out of the millennia on bones.  These clothes, these artefacts endure, unfinished, unconsumed.     pic from: www.freeforumzone.it/ viewmessaggi.aspx?f=7543... pic from: www.scrapbookpages.com/. ../Auschwitz11.html   11:27:42 PM    Mmm? []

© Copyright 2005 Dick Jones. Last update: 01/02/2005; 22:41:32.