... for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
Yesterday was International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
I went to Auschwitz once.
I stood by those railway tracks.
I walked through that gate with that lie wrought over it, "Arbeit Macht Frei".
It was about 30 years ago. And I was lucky. Because I was just visiting a museum. A memorial. And at the end of the day I could get back in the luxury bus, and travel back to my nice hotel, and walk down by the river, and eat a filling meal in a good restaurant.
I knew about Auschwitz of course. We in Europe get a pretty decent education about the Second World War, and the Holocaust. We've seen the films of the camps as they were liberated, and been taught about the concentration camps and the extermination camps. I thought I knew what to expect.
I was wrong.
Because being there, seeing the ovens, the "showers", the barracks - and the nice, clean visitor centre, with its pristine glass cases, filled with thousands of pairs of spectacles, or hundreds of pairs of shoes; and the neat ledgers, documenting with that wonderful German efficiency, how much hair was packed up to be sent for wig-making, how many kilos of soap were produced, how many coats, hats, suits, were sent to Germany. Seeing that infamous wall, with its bullet-holes... no amount of reading, study, film will ever be enough to prepare you.
It was a sunny day when I was there. And (contrary to legend) the birds were singing. And in the twin camp of Birkenau there were rabbits lolloping through the grass. And somehow that felt like an insult. But life goes on. And that life could be where there had been so much death was right and proper.
I went back to my hotel. And I ate that good meal.
And I couldn't sleep for four days.
We must never forget.
Humans are a savage species. The worst of all creatures. And - while we have not been so efficient and so precise about it since then - we still indulge in genocide. Cambodia; Rwanda; Syria; Central African Republic... We are all - every one of us - capable of doing these things, in the right circumstances.
Where are the good men, when will they learn to do something??
Ze
