Two datelines. Two years. Worlds apart.
Dateline: January 18, 2023. Today in history:
1943: During WW II, Jewish insurgents in the Warsaw Ghetto launched their initial resistance against Nazi troops, who eventually succeeded in crushing the rebellion.
Dateline: January 27, 2023. Today in history:
1945: Soviet soldiers liberate Auschwitz-Birkenau, what is later revealed to be the largest Nazi concentration and extermination camp. The Soviets, together with other Allied forces, go on to defeat Nazi Germany.
Two years plus 10 days. In retrospect, not the longest span of time. In retrospect, the two dates were worlds apart.
January 18, 1943.
The Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto had no hope, no future. Inhumane living conditions. Ever increasing rates of illness, starvation and death. Close to half a million people imprisoned, forced to live in a 1.3-square-mile sliver of the universe. Deportations to places even worse, where the lives of men, women and children were brutally snuffed out.
Desperation breeds a willingness to do and try anything, anything to potentially save oneself from the cruel destiny Warsaw Ghetto inhabitants knew they faced when news of the ghetto’s “liquidation” became known. An estimated 13,000 Jews died in the uprising, fighting an unwinnable fight, holding on — impossibly, oh, so nobly — to a sliver of hope that continued to find home in their souls. Their willingness to die testified, ironically, to their passion for life, to the inability of the Nazis, hard as they tried, to eradicate their prisoners’ humanity.
Much as, a little over a year later, members of the Sonderkommando, the prisoners coopted to run the Nazi killing machines, attempted a revolt at the very camp that has become synonymous with Hitler’s Final Solution. Nearly 250 prisoners died and four women leaders executed in the 1944 revolt at Crematoria IV at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Those prisoners, like the ghetto fighters, were under no illusions that their revolt would succeed in its own small corner, let alone succeed in dismantling the Nazi death machine. Yet they tried.
January 27, 1945.
The Jews liberated at Auschwitz — around 7,000 prisoners, most, but not all of them Jews — were beaten down, having lived through long years of witnessing death and destruction. Did they have hope? Were they resigned to whatever fate awaited them? Were they incredulous that they were free — though of course, it was never that simple.
Unlike the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto, what the Jews liberated at Auschwitz had was a glimmer, a wisp of hope that a different future awaited them. Those liberated prisoners were 7,000 individuals, but they were also an idea, a promise, that the Jewish people would survive — and one day even thrive.
Liberated prisoners — from Auschwitz, and from the myriad other Nazi camps that dehumanized their inmates; liberated prisoners who may not have officially been imprisoned but who emerged from the hiding spots where inexplicably they managed to stay alive; these Holocaust survivors gave and give the rest of us hope — hope that good triumphs over evil.
Two dates, two very different points in the Shoah. Together they tell the Jewish story of suffering — and survival.
We will never forget.
Copyright © 2023 by the Intermountain Jewish News
