In my on going journey through my life, I often look for ways to better understand the human condition, understand what are the motivations behind our actions and behaviours. But something that has remained an enigma in history to me is the Holocaust and the phenomena of ‘Holocaust deniers’. How could this tragedy have occured?
To me, taking a position of denying that the Holocaust occurred is unfathomable. Arguments of, ‘it’s all a hoax’ or ‘the numbers are grossly exaggerated’ or even worse, ‘it’s all so old now, who really cares about what happened in the war’ are often quoted. To me, growing up knowing about the atrocities that occurred from history lessons, occasional references to it through from TV and generally accepting it be fact, was all very well understood I thought. To refute that it never happened is like saying that the world is flat and is at the centre of the universe.
But the enormous amount of human emotion that surrounds the story of Auschwitz and the other concentration camps that quikcly became death camps, always meant that it was never easy to talk about and ask for explanations. But with this book, Laurence Rees, has objectively analyzed the reasons, the motivations and methods of the Nazi’s ‘Final Solution’. Although he is a renown scholar and historian, he never loses sight of the emotional impact of the events and through many personal interviews and memoirs, he describes and explains just what went on. Like I said, it’s a devastating read. One night as I put down the book at the start of the chapter titled, ‘Frenzied Killing’ (as if everything to that point had been rather leisurely slaughter), I knew that I would have trouble sleeping. And I did.
So many examples of huge conflicts of interest existed through this time. Everyone that was touched by this war was constantly being thrown into situations where a conflict of interests arises, that more often than not involved that individual’s survival. To describe these events as tragic is like saying ‘committing suicide is admitting that you’re having a bad day’.
If you’ve any interest in understanding with clarity the morbidly remarkable events of this time, I would highly recommend this book.
