79 years ago: Opening of the death mills
This morning, at the Saturday pick-up, it went through my head: Auschwitz, so today, January 27, the Day of the Human Right to Liberation: Auschwitz camp, liberated by officers and crews of the "Red Army" in the attack strip of the 1st Ukrainian Front.
27.01.1945 Auschwitz concentration camp is liberated by Red Army.
Shortly after noon on January 27, 1945, units of the 1st Ukrainian Front on their advance to the west reached the Auschwitz concentration camp site. Upon their arrival, the soldiers were presented with a picture of horror. The bodies of about 650 of the most recently perished camp inmates lay unburied on the frozen ground, and 7,600 people, most of them emaciated to the skeleton and close to starvation, were recovered alive. The attempts of the National Socialists to destroy the traces of their barbaric activities had been insufficiently carried out. Stunned, the Soviet soldiers stood in front of the remains of the blown-up gas chambers, crematoria and the long mass graves, in which lay only a part of the bodies of the approximately three million people who had been brutally murdered here since the fall of 1941. Many bodies had been burned in the crematoria, their ashes had been dumped. Already in November, the Reichsführer SS, Heinrich Himmler, had ordered the evacuation of the camp. On 18. and 19. By the end of January, 98,000 of the last prisoners had been removed from the camp in long columns of up to 2,500 people. Some of them were facing a walk of hundreds of kilometers, thousands of them were shot at the first sign of weakness or exhaustion by the SS units accompanying them. On January 25, Jews were shot for the last time in Auschwitz; a total of 350 men and women who were too weak for the march. Subsequently, the last SS troops left the camp, having previously blown up the fifth and last gas chamber of the concentration camp. They left more than 8,000 prisoners behind, of whom more than 600 died of exhaustion, cold or malnutrition two days later, even before the arrival of the Soviets.
I knew the mountains of corpses of Auschwitz and Bergen -Belsen from my school days: "Night and Fog", we were in class in the French documentary by Alain Resnais ...
"Resnais documentary is one of the most important cinematic works about the German concentration camps. With the greatest stylistic restraint and an extremely sensitive German version by Paul Celan, a depiction of horror is developed in which the contemporary reality of Auschwitz/Birkenau is countered with the documents of the Allied newsreel pictures. A film based on the memory of the unsignable: it anticipates the impossibility of dramatizing the Holocaust and disavows all cheap attempts to "tell" the story of this monstrosity."- Lexicon of International Film
Bulldozers pushed human bodies, emaciated into skeletons, together into gruesome pits. Pictures that I can not sort anywhere.
And apparently I was somehow abnormal, because no one in my class, except me, came up with such a thing as writing about the dead in the final year thesis. I wrote about the poem of the Jewish/German poet in the subject German
Paul Celan
Todesfuge
Deathfugue
Black milk of the early morning we drink it in the evening
we drink them at noon and in the morning we drink them at night
we drink and drink
we're digging a grave in the air there's no one lying tight
A man lives in the house who plays with the snakes who writes
he writes when it gets dark to Germany your golden hair Margarete
he writes it and steps in front of the house and the stars flash and he whistles to his dogs
he whistles his Jews out and lets them dig a grave in the ground
he orders us to play on now for the dance
Black milk of the early morning we drink you at night
we drink you in the morning and at noon we drink you in the evening
we drink and drink
A man lives in the house who plays with the snakes who writes
he writes when it gets dark to Germany your golden hair Margarete
Your ashen hair Sulamith we're shoveling a grave in the airs there's no one lying tight
He calls stabs deeper into the ground you others sing one to the other and play
he reaches for the iron in the belt he swings his eyes are blue
dig deeper the spades you one you others continue to play up to the dance
Black milk of the morning we drink you at night
we drink you at noon and in the morning we drink you in the evening
we drink and drink
a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete
your ashen hair Sulamith he plays with the snakes
He calls sweeter play death Death is a master from Germany
he calls strokes darker the violins then you rise as smoke in the air
then you have a grave in the clouds there you are not lying tight
Black milk of the morning we drink you at night
we'll drink you at noon death is a master from Germany
we drink you in the evening and in the morning we drink and drink
death is a master from Germany his eye is blue
he hits you with a lead bullet he hits you exactly
a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete
he rushes his males at us he gives us a grave in the air
he plays with the snakes and dreams of death is a master from Germany
your golden hair Margarete
your ashen hair Sulamith
About the dead Jews and – if I turn to the dead - you, dead Jews - as well as you. hopelessly trapped near Minsk, Kiev or Stalingrad and elsewhere - after all, our life was arched. Sometimes I thought to myself what you might have been dreaming about, lying on your back in the silence of prolonged battle breaks, under the summer sky with your eyes up to the wandering clouds : about a walk with your loved one , a hike in the mountains in peace, falling asleep together without fear, arm in arm, and it was always clear to me: this is the important thing in life.
The interpretation of the stars that came to me fourty years ago is, I imagine, interesting not only for us living but also - again speaking to the dead - for you, and, I am sure, it is a big step for you if we learn it, about a step like back when we learned to read, write, calculate – new languages, new light, new questions, new answers.
You, even if we are not thinking about you, are the close ones, who else?
Anyway - you, where you are now, are interested, so I feel, as well as me, whether we bring life and symbol together, to the eternal pairs of opposites.
Symbol
_____
Life
or light and darkness, or day and night, or male and female between
Why, why do I suspect the proximity of the dead so? From an inwardly trickling theology, from the murmur of God in the soul? She says that the spirit, according to the baton of which the image and mucus grow together by themselves into muscles and bones, veins and tendons, cells, juices and streams for a short time to the child of man, that spirit seems to be on duty and knows everything - this spirit should not have thought of anything about death and beyond the thinking mortals? Death of man - an accident of God?
In any case, I wish to be close even in death to those dead people to whom I was already close in life, for example, "my" physicist and "my" psychologist, and untimely as the "mundane diary" is, it may bring lonely times to the then deceased mundanomaniac ...
The death mill Auschwitz was a child of the forties, fathered by the wizards of the thirties.
In English: 1.27.2024, UTC: 17:04
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