I’m sorry, but this was a fucking Genocide!

Sometime in middle of February, 1985, I found myself on a very cold winter day outside the gates of Auschwitz alone as part of the last leg of my European travels post college.  I had my very worn orange “Let’s Go” guide, which would be stolen from me while sleeping in a train station the next day in Krakow, but I made it to the second concentration camp of this trip.  The first was at Dachau in Germany about 5 months before, which was crowded with people, cleaned up and almost seemed like a Disney version of what I was stepping into.   It might have also been the circumstance:  I was alone, it was cold, dreary, and starting to snow and I was stepping through the classic gates where the sign  “Arbeit Macht Frei” had been. 

The night before, I bought an English little pamphlet in Krakaw about the famed concentration camp.   I read some horrible stories of prisoners being forced to stand outside naked and if they moved out of line, they would be shot.  I was making some footprints in the snow and found the spot in the guide this shooting range took place.  I stood in the same spot, tried standing upright.  I was in hiking boots with wool socks, jeans and long underwear, a sweater under my North Face Gore-Tex jacket.  After 5 minutes, I was freezing and had to move.  I would have been shot 41 years before that in 1943.  (Damn, I’m getting old, that was almost halfway between now and the Holocaust). 

I needed to go inside, but almost everything seemed shut.  Again, I was the only living soul in the camp, I was making footprints in the snow.  It was surreal.  I found an unlocked door to a building and went in.  Of course, it was a building that housed the piles of eyeglasses, shoes, etc. behind some soviet era thick glass walls.  It was very scary to see this in the flesh, not in books, not in some film, but right there, giant piles of the same item.  I had to leave.    I found a long hallway that had 8x10 black and white photos of faces lined up and as I started to run a little, they were in the peripheral vision on both the right and left.  It started to spook me even more.   I ran out of there and found myself at a crematorium building.   The snow was falling harder and I was looking for the exit. 

I got out of the camp as fast as I could and walked along the road to hitchhike back to Krakow.  Approximately 1.1 million Jews, Poles, Soviet POW’s, and others were killed from 1940 to 1945 just in this one efficiently architected bunch of buildings.   That was a clear planned extermination of human life, the final solution for a mad man and his followers, a legitimate genocide.  Totally intentional.   Don’t confuse that with a war crime. 

I was reminded of this memory visiting the harrowing Nova Music Festival exhibit in New York that opened on Wall Street.  It’s called “06:29am: The Moment Music Stood Still” and shows very dramatically as one walks through the exhibit,  the massacre that happened on October 7^th.  What really triggered me in this exhibit was towards the end--the piles made of backpacks, hats, and the shoes.  While not as dramatic as what I saw at Auschwitz, it reminded me, perhaps the curator’s intent, but how scale can be so powerful.  The patterns found in repetition, even if irregular.    I strongly recommend this exhibit to anyone, regardless of your position on the conflict.  

But my point today is the use of the word Genocide.  I know the definition under international law is that “there must be a proven intent on the part of the perpetrators to physically destroy a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group.  What the IDF in reaction to October 7^th is doing is horrible, disgraceful, and I wish it would stop; however,  it is not the IDF’s strategy to fully eliminate the Palestinian people, but rather Hamas.  This is part of a response to what they did killing innocent people at a music festival and more.   It’s very complicated, it’s horrible, it should stop, but it is not the building of gas chambers with the clear intent of killing every Jew on the planet, a final solution to eliminate every one of us.  The scale is fully different. I wish all the protestors would go see the exhibit, go to a concentration camp, but accept that there is nuance to things, it’s not all binary, and stop throwing words around that they don’t really understand.