When Laurence Rees1, in 1990, asked Wilfred von Oven, the personal attaché of Josef Goebbels, to describe in one word his experience in the Third Reich he easily answered: “Paradise ”.
The real horror of the concentration and extermination camps lies in the fact that the inmates, even if they happen to keep alive, are more effectively cut off from the world of the living than if they had died, because terror enforces oblivion.2
We should never forget Auschwitz-Birkenau, a concentration camp where more than 1.3 millions of people were brutalized and murdered. As once George Santayana said “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”. The lack of memory is a very dangerous issue.
But more than a camp, as the survivors used to say, Auschwitz is a huge cemetery. So this is a place to be visited with the respect that those who suffered and perished deserve.
What else can I say about this place? I have no more words. The most important thing is to go there and check with your own eyes. And never forget...
1. Auschwitz, The Nazis & The Final Solution, Laurence Rees
2. The Origins of Totalitarism, Hannah Arendt
fotos: migalha, lda
