Auschwitz. Not Long Ago. Not Far Away.

from "Auschwitz. Not Long Ago. Not Far Away."

“Another improvement we made over Treblinka was that at Treblinka the victims almost always knew they were to be exterminated and at Auschwitz we endeavored to fool the victims into thinking they were to go through a delousing process,” testified Rudolf Hoss, the commandant of Auschwitz, at Nuremberg in l946. Under what rubric should this testimony be placed? One of the many themes of "Auschwitz. Not Long Ago. Not Far Away." at the Museum of Jewish Heritage was that extermination was an organizational and bureaucratic process. There’s something satanically aspirational in making murder all the more sterile and surgical. “The Final Solution” was instituted by Reich Main Office SS-Obergruppenfuhrer Reinhard Heydrich at the Wannsee Conference in l942. Despite the fall of the Third Reich, the Nazis were remarkably successful in exporting the idea of genocide which would outlive them. It was an idea whose time had come, if one looks at the sad history of the post-war years and what's going on here in America today. Here's another quote from the exhibit, this time from Primo Levi who survived Auschwitz: “If it happened, therefore it can happen again: this is the core of what we have to say. It can happen and it can happen everywhere.”