Gay Conservative

(I started this yesterday morning and didn’t get to finish it; it was important for me to post, so I will post it today and put off my analysis of Obama’s incredibly disjointed State of the Union Address until later. I still have a headache from trying to follow that crap.)

Witold Pilecki founded the Secret Polish Army during Nazi rule and helped run the Polish Resistance. He was also the only man to ever volunteer to be imprisoned by Nazis in a prison camp in order to report on the activities in the concentration camps. He went to Auschwitz in 1940 and escaped two and a half years later, having given invaluable intelligence on the atrocities being committed by the Nazis.

The Allies refused to believe him. They accused him of exaggerating. It wasn’t until two Jewish prisoners escaped in April of 1944 that the Allies took the reports seriously.

On January 27, 1945, the Allies came to a very rude awakening: he was not only not exaggerating, in fact, there were worse crimes being committed than what he reported. Soviet soldiers liberated Auschwitz on that date, finding Jews, Pols, Gypsies, Allied POW’s, homosexuals and others deemed “undesirable” by the Nazis starving, sick, and dead. They had been rounded up like cattle and shipped in inhumane conditions to live a hell on Earth that no human being had previously imagined. The Jews were the main target: by war’s end, six million Jews had been slaughtered in the Nazi quest for the “final solution” to the “Jewish question”.

After arriving by foot through the wrought-iron main gate of Auschwitz, prisoners were stripped of all belongings–including clothes and shoes–and sorted so their prison uniforms could be marked correctly. Later, once Auschwitz had grown beyond a single camp and became an extermination camp, the sorting was to decide who would be immediately sent to the gas chambers and who was allowed to live.

Those allowed to live would soon wish to die. The rules were numerous, difficult to follow and easy to break, and punishments were dire. There were standing cells, cells measuring a total of about 16 square feet, where prisoners would be packed four or five at a time so that all they could do was stand–and still be forced to work the next day. Dark cells were practically sealed; prisoners would be locked inside until they had used up all the oxygen and suffocated. A popular punishment was hanging prisoners by their arms for days (this would dislocate their shoulder and elbow joints and they would be left hanging in this state). Starvation cells were used where prisoners would be kept without food or water until they started to death. And it was at Auschwitz that a Nazi first tested Zyklon-B on a few hundred prisoners, paving the way for the gas chambers to be put to full use.

It was Auschwitz-Birkenau, or Auschwitz II, that became the main extermination camp after the original camp became overcrowded (an amazing feat considering that bunks lining prisoner’s quarters were stacked three high and held four bodies each). Once Birkenau opened, Jews arrived by train and were immediately sorted between who would live and who would die. Their personal belongings would be stripped of them and put on a train to be sent back to Germany for sale. The incoming and outgoing trains regularly passed each other.

Jews deemed capable of manual labor would be sorted to live. Those who were determined as useless, normally about three quarters of prisoner shipments and including all children, women with children, the elderly and the ill, were sent immediately to the gas chambers. They would be marched to the outer chamber and told to strip for showering and delousing, then herded into the sealed chamber itself and gassed to death. Birkenau had a capacity to gas and cremate upwards of 20,000 prisoners a day. The dead would then be checked for any gold jewelry and teeth, which were also sent back to Germany for sale.

Eventually, the SS troops at Birkenau were murdering so many Jews daily that they had to use open-air pits outside the creamatoria to burn bodies.

Appalling medical experiments were also conducted at Auschwitz by a number of Nazi doctors, including the infamous Josef Mengele. X-rays were used to cause sterilization, women had ther uteruses glued shut with a variety of chemicals, and gangrene was injected into subjects so that the effects of the illness and various treatments could be studied.

Nobody I knew remembered what yesterday was. Not one person I asked could tell me the significance of January 27. Poland turned Auschwitz into a museum just before 1950; it took the rest of the world decades to set up anything in remembrance of the Holocaust. To this day, there remains a small but vehement factor of people who deny that the Holocaust ever happened.

It astounds me that there are those in America who try to compare Republicans with Nazis in the light of what the Nazis actually did. I believe that, for this reason, people have begun to forget just how evil the Nazis really were; using them to describe those disliked by liberals demeans the reality of what happened.

We cannot allow ourselves to forget the incredible darkness that befell the world before and during WWII. Nor can we allow the anti-Semitism that pervades our culture to this day to continue while we lambast those for supposed racism over comments about skin color (ask Al Sharpton what he thinks of Jews–he helped start a riot against them in New York).

We cannot forget or we will be damned to repeat it.