Eighty-one years ago today, the Red Army—no strangers to
nightmares—came upon a hollowed-out shell of a compound that became the
one-word representation of the worst that humans could do to one another. And
so today, on the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, we mark
International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Auschwitz-Birkenau was a conglomeration of factories—both
for manufacturing and for death, as distinguished from other camps like
Majdanek or Sobibor or Treblinka, which were devoted to extermination pure and
simple. Great German industrial powerhouses, like the chemical monolith I.G.
Farben and arms giant Krupp, consumed hundreds of thousands of prisoners as
slave labor in their factories. Those who could no longer work went to the gas
chambers, where one of Farben’s most famous products, Zyklon B (developed for
pest control), snuffed out their lives.
Oh, well—you know all that, don’t you?
And yet, you don’t, or you forget, or you become impatient
with remembering, because it’s uncomfortable and inconvenient and even
unpleasant to think about it. And there’s always someone ready to shout about
how one atrocity is offset by another because it preceded it, or went on
longer, or involved one ethnic or religious group or another.
But the events of recent weeks (and years and decades) have
made it all too clear that those who do not learn from history’s mistakes are
doomed to repeat them. Anti-Semitism, intolerance, racism, fascism and
dogmatism are on the rise—and all of them right here in the US. And now that
pretty much anyone has access to assault rifles, RPG launchers, bio-weapons and
worse, we do well to haul ourselves out of our daily stroll through the trees
and take a good, hard look at the bloody forest.
We have been provided with irrefutable proof on an
unimaginably massive scale, within living memory, that those who begin by
burning books have no qualms whatsoever about burning people. If we can’t learn
that lesson, I just despair.
©2026 Bas Bleu
