Auschwitz and The Holocaust

Not that you should really be listening to me on this subject but, as tiny and insignificant as it is, this website gives me some sort of “public” voice and there’s only one thing to talk about today.

To be honest, it’s been the only thing on my mind all month. Auschwitz’s liberation is the chosen date of a remembrance ceremony which, every year, seeks to represent the entire set of events which constituted the mass slaughter of six million people under Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich. It’s so much more than a mere “moment in history” and it’s encumbant upon us all, I feel, to discover and remember exactly what happened.

Amid the many TV, printed press and radio pieces, a six-part series on BBC2 television which I hope you can all view, Auschwitz: The Nazis and “the Final Solution” (Tuesday’s 9PM), has become the centre-piece of the media’s efforts. No other form of TV programme should ever again be described as “essential viewing”. This is it, in every respect. It’s horrific - absolutely horrific - but it’s unflinching in it’s telling of the story which must be told, as long as we have mouths to speak and hands to type and eyes to view the pictures.

A sister programme, a memorial musical event from the remains of the Auschwitz death camp itself, which I viewed last Saturday night on the same channel, will live with me for a very long time. Tears seem proof of bona fide empathy for many who view such programmes but, among all the interviews with survivors which peppered and informed teh musical pieces, one Auschwitz victim described how teh SS officers would weep like children when the clasical musicians they’d interred played them their music of choice.

Tears mean nothing. True empathy for the victims of the Holocaust is impossible for anyone who was not there or is not related to someone who was.

Never has the discrepancy between Signifier and Signified - the sound and shape of word/s and what they actually allude to - been as sharply demonstrated as with the phrase “The Holocaust”. Despite the fact there are few more potent phrases in language, these two words are as far as it’s possible to be from actually conveying the full horror of what they seek to represent.

Never let the scale of the Nazi attrocity detract from what it meant to every victim on a personal basis. The subjugation of the individual. You take a person and you remove all their rights. You take all their money. You move them in to bad housing and starve them. You put that person on a train used for cattle and you take them on a tortuous journey to a place that stinks of death. You strip them of their clothes, you strip them of any last vestiges of dignity, you tattoo them, you torture them, you gas them to death, you disrespect their remains in the vilest way possible and you do this all SIX MILLION TIMES.

There is no redemption. The Holocaust legacy has absolutely no redeeming aspect to it, no matter how little. When people view tragedies on TV news programes one of the most common reactions is to feel that you suddenly appreciate your own lot in life - your own troubles are qucikly thrown into stark relief by the misery and suffering of others. Pretty soon we’ll have stories of survivors and “a community united in grief”. The positives are eeked out of death and destruction as mercilessly as the sound-bite media can manage.

With The Holocaust this is simply impossible. It isn’t a “reality check” for the rest of the world because industrial murder, genocide on that level, is so far beyond comprehension as to be almost NOT real. It really happened , yes, but how can we relate to it? I’ll tell you one thing, we’d all better relate to it as best we can fucking manage. Because the causes of this slaughter are in no way unique - they’re with us all, every day.

Remember the victims, yes. But far, far more important is to remember WHY it all hapened. THAT’s what the programme I watched touches on only in passing and this is the key reason I’m discussing it on a football website: The Holocaust came from, more than anything else, STEREOTYPING.

Ignorance and racism and a twisted world-view led to the deaths of 6 million people. The Nazis treated their victims as they themselves thought - like cattle. We must always remember that any herd we are a part of can never subjugate our personal individuality and no grouping under which you even casually label others prevents them from being so very different from every other member of their own flock.

I make a big point on this site of avoiding any of the tiresome sectarian name-calling which goes on in the Rangers-Celtic “divide”. But I still generalise and childishly insult fans of Celtic, fans of Aberdeen. It may seem petty given the horrors we’re presently discussing but I’m currently weighing up my own view that a bit of poison in the football arena helps get it out our systems.

Rather than acting as a social safety valve, I think, in many instances, football rivalry acts as a social pressure cooker.

The BNP have sold their hate-filled messages outside Ibrox. I no longer go to the game via Mafeking Street but a couple of years ago I saw them there on more than one ocassion. No-one was buying but no-one was kicking seven shades of shit out them either.

I’d like to think it was The Rangers support reluctantly accepting that hatred, even of neo-nazis, is the juice of genocide and we must respect even the wannabe, demented saddo’s right to free speech. But it wasn’t. It was stereotyping of OURSELVES by Rangers fans: Rangers are a right-wing team, Celtic the left (I wont even go into the religion side of it) - BULL-SHIT! No one person is identical in every respect to another - the football provides a comradeship of convenience but also a rivalry of convenience. We should NEVER take it any further.

We must think before you subscribe to any general attitude. I know I need to do it more and I certainly know half the ratbags in Scotland who “follow football” need to ask themselves “how often do I feel hatred”. When, in an everyday situation, you feel hate, YOU have the problem - don’t EVER lump it onto someone else.

Remembering The Holocaust isn’t so much about how much we grieve as how much we OWE. We owe those victims our dedicated individual efforts to ensure Auschwitz, Treblinka, Dachau, Belsen and every other horror which constitutes the entire Holocaust is never allowed to happen again.

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Published:
01.27.05 / 9pm
Category:
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