The Fawns of Auschwitz
A new piece from me in the Washington Monthly.
Fearless reporting, a behind-the-curtains look at how journalism is made — and an unabashed point of view. Welcome to Chills.
Protruding from the ceiling like a barnacle, the anachronistic modern, white smoke alarm was the first thing I noticed when I entered a “decontamination room” at Auschwitz. Used to rid clothing of vermin, this was not the gas chambers but a precursor in a prisoner barracks where dozens of dry, wooden, Holocaust-era three-tiered bunks looked ready to become kindling. A haunting Prussian-blue stain around the disinfection area’s inner archway was a reminder of the Nazis’ use of the poison Zyklon-B to disinfect clothing—to kill lice and fleas—as well as to murder the arrivals themselves when the time was right. The Nazis, of course, saw the Jews as vermin, a word that Donald Trump managed to revive this month single-handedly.
As I considered this dehumanizing linkage with the cluster of Nazi structures in southern Poland, I was reminded of Ukraine, where I’ve been covering the war on and off since Russia invaded last year. Vladimir Putin’s propaganda machine has dehumanized Ukrainians, portraying them as “inferior” and as “Nazis,” making it easier for the inculcated to kill them. While I was at Auschwitz, Israel’s defense minister called Hamas “human animals.”
Rendering the enemy as subhuman is as old as war, a time-tested way to motivate one’s troops and drain their compassion lest it stymie their fight. But nobody is less than human—a banal point, but one that got lost in the 20th century as Romanovs, Jews, Kulaks, Bosnians, Tutsis, Roma, Biafrans, and so many others were easier to kill if they were seen as vermin.
To read the rest of this article, please click over to the Washington Monthly.
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Chills, indeed. I have been to Dachau. There, too, is this weight of feeling.