Democracy dies at high noon

A sign at Majdanak

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

— George Santayana

I have been thinking about Treblinka, Auschwitz, Majdanak, Theresienstadt, the Warsaw, Lublin, Krakow ghettos, Oskar Schindler’s factory, and all of the inhumanity I bore witness to across Poland, where the scars of Nazi occupation and evil remain etched for eternity. The magnitude of the violence inflicted on Poland and the Polish people by Nazi Germany beggars the imagination, and truly overwhelms the senses. Yet, it is real, and it is recent. The events occurred within the span of living memory. There are hundreds of thousands of living survivors from places that defy description, but whose existence requires constant reminding because they linger at the edge of an abyss that can be found again. What does “Never Again” mean if there is collective amnesia about what happened?

Pawel Sawicki is a former a radio journalist, who has spent the last 16 years working at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. I was fortunate enough to be able to spend the day with him, walking around and witnessing an imponderable place. I looked at him as we passed the remnants of the gas chambers, and I said, “It’s f@#%ing madness. Madness.”

Pawel said, “Yes, but it is also rational. Everything is hyper-rational here.”

This is the most stunning and penetrating revelation for me.

How did it come to be that Zyklon B, an insecticide, was used to kill more than 1.3 million people in five identical brick buildings that were industrial murder facilities? Two thousand people would walk down the stairs and into an undressing compartment. After undressing, they would move into the next chamber, where the lethal gas would be pumped. Next, the bodies of the murdered were desecrated; stripped of their hair, gold teeth, and anything of value. Next, they were put into the ovens, and turned into smoke. The ashes were dumped into adjacent ponds.

Babies, mothers, the elderly, disabled, sick, children — all went to the gas on arrival. They lasted only a few hours at Auschwitz. The killing never stopped in front of the thousands of witnesses who would survive the camp as prisoners. They watched the furnaces belch flame into the sky, and were covered in ash that fell like snow from them constantly.

How did this happen?

This is the most important question, but it is not the intuitive one.

Who knew, and what did they do to stop it?

That is the intuitive question. That is what people want to know when they see such a place. Certainly it was what the overwhelming amount of young people we encountered across the day in large groups were asking their guides. It made sense to me. The question is instinctive, moral, natural and utterly human.

There is a simple truth about Auschwitz, and it is terrifying. There were no monsters there, and everybody knew. The victims and perpetrators shared one thing in common. They were all ordinary people. All of them.

The Nazis held no secrets regarding their intentions towards the Jews. What happened was foretold in movies, speeches, posters, violent acts, racist laws, and a million cuts of malice. It was promised for 20 years, and then it happened in a spasm of murder that killed six million Jews and millions of non-Jews between 1933 and 1945. The murder was planned. The difference between Treblinka and Auschwitz was the most perverse type of innovations possible to imagine.

Zyklon B was tested on 600 Soviet prisoners of war and 250 sick prisoners sealed in the basement of cell block 11 because the SS wanted to see if that many could be killed more efficiently using the insecticide, as opposed to gassing the victims with the exhaust fumes of a tank, which was noisy and burned a great deal of fuel. Gassing itself was an innovation borne from the psychological damage being done to the perpetrators of mass killings, who were become psychotic after shooting tens of thousands of people. The idea was that gas was more humane for both the murderer and murderer.

The Nazi logic and the degeneracy it unleashed was compounding. It built into an uncontrollable force of insanity, murder and violence that remains difficult, but utterly necessary to grasp.

A few kilometers from Treblinka there is a railway spur, where more than 900,000 murdered Jews stopped on their way to death. The transports of Jews left Warsaw early in the morning in trains made up of 60 rail cars, filled with 80 to 100 people. The trains stopped about five kilometers outside of Treblinka in front of a small village where the SS took 20 rail cars at a time to the death camp. My guide told me that people stare at the houses — silent witnesses — in wonder, and often in anger, asking indignantly about the inaction of the villagers towards stopping the Holocaust at hand. What is it exactly that they were supposed to do? Attack the SS?

This moment in America is not a secret. MAGA is not a clandestine affair. Donald Trump never stops talking. Ever.

There is no person alive who will be able to say that they didn’t know when the Trump story is at its end, though many will say they didn’t. Donald Trump has promised violence, retribution, punishment, revenge and blood in the streets. The record shows clearly that there is no joke at hand or parody at play. He seems to be saying these things because he believes them. He wants to make them happen. They are political promises that are a rebuttal to every known concept of political tolerance and pluralism. They are a threat aimed at the American way of life. It may be the case that the American people choose to give power to a pack of vandals promising to destroy the works of 248 years, but no one will ever get to say that they had no idea what was coming.

Denying the ability to forget the travesties ahead by learning the lessons of past episodes of mass national amnesia and delusion are important. The United States of America is a nation where the “lost cause” myth thrived, and continues to thrive, because there is a nostalgia for oppression, subjugation, and repression that lurks in the present. We are living in an era of revanchism and a rising fascism that is seeking to contest the universal truths about human dignity that are under siege all over the world by a sinister lie in service of a sinister cause.

Each day in America splays out like a new episode of a reality television show where the news is packaged into morsels of agitation, sprinkled with conspiracies,
lies, extremism and violence for fantastical profits. There is no such thing as cause and effect, consequences, reality, truth or evil. It has brought us to an edge that is plain to see.

The last and final amazement from the concluded age of Trump will be the denial and the multitudes who deny they heard, saw or understood what was happening in plain sight, loudly, plainly and clearly, every day.

When the great absurdities and lies of this age are all sorted through there will be few that equal Jeff Bezos’ mandated “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” It doesn’t, and never has. The phrase is cheap. It’s a cop out, and I find it revolting.

Democracy dies at high noon, and everyone knows when it is dying. There are no secrets in America, and there were no secrets in Germany. The America First movement of the 1930s was amoral and wrong. The America First movement of the 2020s is amoral and wrong.

There is a grave crisis at hand. Let’s not pretend that it is a secret. Denial doesn’t erase reality.

This great age of gaslighting, menace and idiocy will end. The disaster that is left behind is an open question. When we get there it won’t be a surprise. Everyone will know how — even if it is easier to pretend that there was no way to have known.

That will always be a lie.

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