Today marks the 80th anniversary of the liberation by Soviet soldiers of Auschwitz, the German extermination camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. More than 1.1 million European Jews died there in gas chambers or crematoria behind the walls and barbed wire hiding horror and suffering beyond description.
Looking back over six or seven thousand years of our blood-spattered world history, the “Final Solution,” as the Nazis euphemistically referred to the extermination of Jews, gypsies, the disabled, criminals, homosexuals and others deemed unworthy persons, must rank among the top five on the list of brutalities committed against innocent human beings.
The imprisonment process took away everything from a person, no matter what age. They lost gold teeth, shoes, clothing, their dignity, even their names — substituted by tattooed numbers. I’m guessing many lost all hope and even a glimmer of what was left of their faith. Then, they lost their lives.
Recently I saw a post of the railroad tracks going into the gate at Auschwitz with this text over the photo: “If there is a God, he will have to beg for my forgiveness.” It had been carved on a wall inside a building there in the camp.
Today I plan to pause, alone, and listen to a powerfully moving work by composer Henryk Górecki titled “Symphony of Three Sorrowful Songs.” The setting of the first is a Fifteenth-Century lament from the Monastery of the Holy Cross in Romania, and the third replicates a mournful folk song in the dialect of a region in southwest Poland. The source of the second movement’s text, sung so woefully by soprano Joanna Koslowska, is a prayer written on the wall of a Gestapo cell in Zakopane, Poland, by an 18-year-old girl imprisoned there. The town’s name means “buried.”
In an interview Górecki spoke about the horrific events of the war and commented that “Those things are too immense; you cannot write music about them.” I agree with his sentiment, but must argue that his composition has indeed sadly accomplished what he denies is possible.
Thanks to his sorrowful music, I will never forget, even if, in a vain effort to erase the images of unspeakable brutality, I want to.
Crossing Paths 