Several columns ago, I used the phrase, “Thunder without sound,” when writing about our First Lady, Melania Trump. After my wife, two good friends, and I toured Auschwitz, I hope you’ll allow me to reuse that phrase, albeit slightly changed.
Auschwitz doesn’t whisper, shout, or mumble; it’s a quiet explosion rocking the foundation of my soul. I walked through our tour with an open mind, allowing it to flow rudderlessly to shape an outline for me to express in a way I hope makes sense. However, to properly share my thoughts, I’ll need to break this down into a few parts.
There was a strong sense of irony as we entered the camp, disembarking in the same area that victims did around 85 years ago, except we knew what to expect. The air felt different as we entered through the gates, almost as though it remembered. The weather truly fit the mood: windy, cold, rainy, as if we needed a reminder of what occurred there.
Then the barracks, the long rows of brick, standing like mute witnesses refusing to look away. When we entered them, it hit me, it wasn’t sadness, although that was there, it was rage. Unrestricted, boiling rage.
I was furious when looking at the selection lines, where men sitting in uniforms holding clipboards, deciding on the fly which prisoner would be healthy enough to work, and those who didn’t died a cruel death minutes later.
I felt tremendous rage towards the officers who carried out orders with German precision, with polished boots and a cold resolve. Rage at wives kissing their husbands goodbye, unsure if they would ever see them again, even though the SS soldiers told them they needed to shower off the dust of the long railroad ride. Rage at the local neighbors who saw trains packed with souls, heard cries, smelled the smoke, and decided to stick their heads into the ground. To them, silence was much safer than defiance.
The husband of the couple brought this up afterward, during a quiet lunch, the pejorative word, “Nazi.” Because of our tour today, I will never be able to connect that word uttered by idiots in America to what I witnessed. President Donald Trump and his cabinet aren’t Nazis when they’re working to restore our government, fix a broken education system, or clean up a nest of entrenched bureaucrats in the CDC.
No, the barracks made history books lie when calling this history an atrocity or tragedy, words too soft and sterile to describe what happened accurately. What occurred wasn’t a tragedy; it was a choice, not an accident of war but an enterprise of extermination, the result of an industry of evil, designed and maintained by people who enjoyed dinners with their families after a day of murder.
People casually tossing around that word will never have the bravery to face an evil that took the face of Nazis, because if they did, they would hopefully look themselves in the mirror and resolve never to use that word in anger again.
Yeah, right.
The Machinery of Murder
It took the Nazis a few years to transform chaos into order; trains arrived on time, families divided left or right based on a nod from a camp doctor, a chance for life when chosen for labor, or an immediate death. Bureaucrats dictated who worked until collapse and who walked straight into gas chambers disguised as showers.
It’s nearly impossible to estimate the number of people on the planet who believe the Holocaust was nothing more than a myth. The rage in me ebbed when looking at the evidence that’ still there, especially in its ordinariness: Shoes piled high, still laced, neatly labeled suitcases because the victims were told that they’d retrieve them later — they expected relocation, not annihilation. What nearly put me over the edge was the sight of roughly two tons of preserved human hair. Something I didn’t know was that the Nazis shaved the heads of men and women, primarily women, and kept the hair for industrial uses, typically woven into fabric used for felt and stuffed inside mattresses.
The Nazis felt pride in their efficiency, where industrial-scale murder ran like a factory line. Engineers designed crematoria, and doctors performed selection using the same detachment they would use when diagnosing illness.
The trains continued rolling, while the killing kept up with them. Civilization didn’t collapse; it simply inverted itself: Knowledge, science, law, and order remained intact, yet severed from conscience.
For the first few years Auschwitz opened, the Nazis took ID photos of all incoming prisoners. Looking at the eyes of the people who defied with their eyes struck home for me. The people in those pictures were of the era of my parents and grandparents; it was impossible for me to see my loved ones standing in front of those cameras.
That’s why the barracks left me furious, because the horror wasn’t the product of monsters from another world: It was men and women belonging to a civilization stripped of their souls.
The Neighbors’ Silence
Evil on this scale requires more than the executioners, making the complicity harder to bear than the perpetrator’s uniforms. This evil demands silence from the neighboring world, which saw ash drifting from chimneys, looking the other way, while others convinced themselves they didn’t know: The rest preferred the relative safety of silence to the perils of truth.
The screams from Auschwitz carry across time, yelling that evil doesn’t grow in secret, it grows in plain sight, and “decent” people decide it’s somebody else's problem.
A Warning Hidden in Anger
I didn’t walk out of the barracks feeling lighter, but shocked and sad, while carrying the weight of fury, including a warning buried inside. Auschwitz dares you to prove that you would have stood up while others looked away.
The temptation to remain silent in evil’s face didn’t die at the end of World War II. Proving that the world still watches atrocities, calling them “complex conflicts,” the bureaucrats continue inventing euphemisms like “complex conflicts” to avoid responsibility, so when neighbors heard cries, they were able to pretend they didn’t hear anything.
Auschwitz doesn’t only belong to history; it’s the mirror held up to us, asking if we continue remaining silent.
Final Thoughts
Even though Auschwitz is a memorial, I don’t think it’s an opportunity for reflection; it demands confrontation. Barracks aren’t relics; they’re accusations reminding us that civilization is a fragile thing, where ordinary people build Hell when conscience is stripped away, and silence is as deadly as complicity.
I wasn’t moved to tears when I walked out; I was moved to fury because anger is the only honest response to standing where mankind decided that sitting was a safer path for them. I felt the camp figured that efficiency mattered more than mercy.
This fury must never fade, or else the barracks stands ready to welcome new victims, except now they’re built with the hands of contemporaries who continue to forget their humanity.
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