* * * * *
Lessons from the
Holocaust for the present day.
This book is the
author’s first-hand account of what she experienced between 1942
and 1945, mainly in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp,
bolstered by what she was told by others who were also there and
whose accounts she was careful to check as far as possible. Auschwitz
was a large forced labour camp including several different industrial
enterprises which paid the SS for slave labour intentionally worked
to death there. Birkenau was a reception and extermination camp
within Auschwitz, where those who might be able to work were
separated from those who might not be able to work. The former were
set to work, for as long as they lasted in dreadful conditions, the
latter were killed more or less immediately unless they had other
uses. Few detainees were retained to work in Birkenau itself and even
fewer survived. A significant proportion of these had medical
training, and partly because of this not only were they forced to
assist in medical experiments on humans; they understood what they
were seeing. The author was more or less the only one who both
understood what she was seeing and lived to tell the tale. Forgive me
if there were others, but this really is the best all-round account
we have.
This isn’t a
review of a book I was asked to read and review or one I just
happened to review: it is a review of a book I remembered from years
ago and bought and read a fresh copy of, because there are things
happening in the world today which cannot be fully discussed for many
reasons, the most valid of which is that some crimes and tragedies
are so unbelievable that they are innocently and helplessly denied by
eye-witnesses and even direct victims at the scene and caught up in
the process. The less valid reason is that the authors of great
tragedies inevitably and energetically contest the facts until the
last guilty verdict is delivered a decade or two after the event.
George Santayana
wrote that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to
repeat it” but how might we learn the lessons of a recent past that
is hidden from us? We cannot remember what we are not allowed to
know! Well, Santayana’s quote supplies the tools we need: the sort
of person or coalition of vested interests that might obfuscate truth
and reality on a global scale might very well fail to remember the
past and, therefore, the past will contain a template for the very
actions they are condemned to repeat, the study of which will allow
the rest of us to understand not only what has just been going and
what is going on now, but what the next moves might be!
Because this is a
non-fiction account of historical events with no surprise twists at
the end, I will be breaking my usual rule by using three quotes from
the text. The first quote is actually from a letter sent to the
author after pre-publication copies were circulated and it is in the
front matter of the Kindle version reviewed here; you have to click
or tap LEFT from the “beginning” to see it:
“you have done a
real service by letting the ones who are now silent and most
forgotten speak…”
A. Einstein.
This is not a
celebrity endorsement but an authoritative one. It is time for a
substantial number of old and new readers to both read and discuss
this book, if the evil described in it is not to re-occur either
because we do not recall or because we do not understand. All
knowledge, even seemingly unshakeable “scientific or historical
fact” decays into myth and superstition without the regular
refreshment of discussion and debate. And “never again!” becomes
a self-denying mantra if no-one is allowed to compare the Holocaust
to other situations: past, present or future. Because even though
these things are not exactly the same as the Holocaust (no two things
are ever exactly the same) some of them may very well be heading in
the same general direction at a greater or lesser pace. If we
redefine “never again” as being “we’ll let anything pass just
so long as we can see a shred of difference between it and the Holocaust” then we really are on the fast track to Hell.
The second quote is:
“The dissemination
of ‘false news’ was forbidden by the Germans on pain of death.”
The politics of the
Third Reich is linked to the present not by swastikas, parades
through avenues of upturned searchlights, MP38/40 machine-pistols or
even gas chambers, but by the global trend towards the rigid and
increasingly ruthless imposition of a single narrative for everything,
imposed by those with no visible chain of accountability. Not only
are people having their lives and careers wrecked by even minor
departures from the official narrative, that narrative appears much
more complicated and far-reaching than that of Dr Goebbels and is
therefore easier to transgress against. And it is the single
allowable narrative that makes “NAZI Science” a dangerous idol
for those who have learned not to deny the Holocaust itself. The
striking thing about most of the human experiments described in
Chapter XXII is not that they were cruel and murderous, never mind
“unethical” but that they were completely and utterly
unscientific, designed either to prove a premise that it was illegal
to contradict, or simply devised by the camp’s own medical officers
for their own amusement.
The remaining
experiments were mainly only semi-scientific and most amounted to
product development tests by German chemical and pharmaceutical
companies of which Bayer was (and still is) the most significant.
“Big Pharma” starts with Bayer, not with Beecham’s Pills. A
vaccine institute sent numerous vaccines to be tested on Holocaust
victims, but it isn’t clear that any useful information was
recorded, because the test subjects were mostly sent to the gas
chambers before the vaccines had time to work. If in the present day
or the future, mass experiments are conducted, without informed
consent on either a national or a global scale, with their execution
and interpretation subject to a single authorised narrative which may
not be challenged on pain of whatever punishment, they will be as
unscientific and useless as those conducted in Auschwitz-Birkenau and
recorded in “Five Chimneys.” The results of the tests there
weren’t always even recorded because the narrative would not
change, no matter what those results were. This kind of experiment is
only really intended to give diktat a scientific veneer.
The third and final
quote concerns a question which troubled not only the author but many
of her medical colleagues forced to help conduct tests and
experiments within the camp. There was a separate site for
sterilisation experiments and these differed from the usual pattern
in that the authorities actually seemed to have an interest in the
results. Given that all camp inmates (and not just experimental
subjects) were supposed to die in the camp anyway, what was the
interest in sterilisation? They asked an Aryan German social worker
who knew a lot of important people in Berlin (which may in itself
explain why he ended up in Birkenau!) what it was all about:
“If they could
sterilise all non-German people still alive after their victorious
war, there would be no danger of new generations of ‘inferior’
peoples. At the same time, the living populations would be able to
serve as labourers for about thirty years. After that time, the
surplus German population would need all the living space in those
countries, and the ‘inferiors’ would perish without descendants.”
The implication of
that is that the primary victim groups of the Holocaust were just
that: only the first on a list which ultimately included the vast
majority of the human population of Planet Earth.
That’s an
objective not recorded in “Mein Kampf” but it was inscribed on
the Georgia Guidestones before someone fairly recently blew them up
with mining explosives. (Since the Guidestones were erected without the knowledge or consent of local authorities and residents, it's not clear if this demolition broke any laws. Whoever did it may have been legally as well as technically expert.)
Footnote, not published on Amazon out of respect
for their community guidelines.
Five Chimneys by
Olga Lengyel has been published in several imprints since 1959; they
all seem to be basically the same edition and this is a link to one
of the imprints on Amazon that is currently available as either a
Kindle E-book or a paperback:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B06XGLG1DR
This is the source
which this review is based on, but for copyright reasons readers in
some Amazon domains might have to search for a different imprint of
the same title and by the same author. In some countries it might be
easier to access from second hand bookshops, either online or in a
quiet back street.
(There used to be a
pub on the Herts/Beds border called “The Five Chimneys” and
anything with this title but not by Olga Lengyel may prove to be a
beery history of a rural hostelry overlooking the Arlesey
Brickworks!)
I actually read this
book as a paperback more than a quarter of a century ago, but when I
found myself wishing for a book saying things about recent and
ongoing happenings which are not yet allowed to be said, I remembered
that one had already been written and published two generations ago
and all I had to do was buy it on Kindle, check that it still said
what I remembered it had said, leave a review on Amazon and encourage
others to not only read it for themselves and reach their own
conclusions, but leave a review of their own on Amazon or anywhere
else that’ll accept it.
