Arbeit macht frei: - Fredrick Töben

Take my younger sister, #2. After seeing ‘Inglorious Basterds’ last week, I
had to assure her that Hitler, Himmler and the rest of the Nazi vermin
were not blown up while viewing a movie.
Don’t get me wrong: I love Tarantino, and I really enjoyed the film. But at
the end of the movie my father, who’s mother survived two and a half
years in Auschwitz, shook his head and smiled. ‘I wish those inglorious
bastards had existed. I’d probably have grown up with grandparents if they
had.’
There’s entertainment and then there’s history. When you put them in
the hands of someone like Tarantino you get entertaining history which
most young people treat as historical documentaries. These people believe
what they see, and why not? It looked realistic to me.
So I have to wonder: Are we placing our heritage in the right hands?
Although there were certainly many heroes during the Holocaust, both
Jewish and Gentile, the catastrophic outcome of this madman’s dream led
to millions dead, despite the heroic efforts of some.
When my Grandmother went to see ‘Life Is Beautiful’ she really loved the
movie, especially the way the barracks were so clean and the prisoner’s
outfits well-ironed.
‘If only the Camps were like that!’ she lamented. ‘By the end of the War
we were lined up in the snow totally naked for the ‘counting’, the final
decider of who would live and who would die. Oh, I just wish the war was
like the movies.’
As the years go by, more and more misinformation about the Holocaust
blurs our understanding of the facts. Yes indeed, facts are sometimes
stranger than fiction, but fiction can make mincemeat of facts. Movies, as
important as they are for documenting real life events, still have to add the
spices of love, adventure, action, etc. to make their concoction palatable to
their audiences. Right now, the Nazis are always the bad guys. But what if
a wealthy Holocaust Denier (and there are wealthy ones) decides to make
a movie showing how dedicated the Nazi soldiers and officers were to the
Fatherland and how it was the Jews’ fault they were murdered? Sounds
impossible? That’s what they said about the Holocaust in 1933.
When I went to Poland with my Grandmother who wanted to revisit
Auschwitz, she showed me the hard, wood bed she and 11 other women
slept in. She pointed to the spot where she last saw her Mother torn from
her arms. She relived the terrifying memory of the cries and pleas of those
gagging to death in the gas chambers.
We heard our guide explain about the conditions in the Camp, about the
tortures, about the kapos, and the sadism of the Nazis. After the lecture
and tour, my younger brother turned to me and said, ‘You know how the
war ended, don’t you? Hitler killed himself.’
‘Yeah, so the rumor has it,’ I confirmed.
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