Oswiecim, Poland
THREE HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS stood in front of the memorial to their family and friends, waiting for the ceremony commemorating the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. The three men were dressed almost identically, in brown boots, gray slacks, heavy black coats, and blue and white striped hats that resembled the prison uniforms they’d worn as children. And each man wore a blue and white sash across his chest with a red “P”–for his native Poland–and his identification number.
The man on the right stood at attention, and the one in the middle seemed to lean a bit on the commemorative flag he held. The man on the left–No. 46464–fidgeted incessantly, shifting his weight from left foot to right and right foot to left. He flexed his fingers and swung his head from side to side, surveying the crowd. He looked nervous, but was probably just cold.
The subfreezing temperature meant that everyone in attendance was bundled up–most of the dignitaries in black, and the crowd in a wide array of colors. Snowflakes the size of quarters drifted lightly to the ground, adding to the six-inch accumulation of the previous two days. The three survivors stood on spongy blue squares to keep their feet off the snow. The cold was somehow right.
The survivors chatted amongst themselves; their occasional laughter would have seemed inappropriate from anyone else. Standing just a few feet away from the men, in the section roped off for journalists, a young woman wept silently, moved by the occasion even before the ceremony began. Suddenly, and at a decibel level so loud it was almost painful, the stadium-sized speakers emitted the piercing sounds of a train screeching to a halt. One of the many haunting features of Auschwitz is the train track that stops in the middle of the camp–the track used to import over a million Jews from across Europe to their demise in southwestern Poland.
The solemn ceremony lasted nearly four hours. Several dignitaries spoke. Vice President Dick Cheney, representing the United States, was not one of them. In fact, over the course of three days in Poland, Cheney made only three short speeches, deliberately keeping a low profile on a trip meant mainly to pay respect to the victims of the Holocaust and the soldiers who liberated Auschwitz. (Cheney–who had been to Auschwitz once before, in 1975, as chief of staff to Gerald Ford–met privately with Polish president Aleksandr Kwasniewski and newly elected Ukrainian president Viktor Yushchenko.)
In the remarks he did make, Cheney alluded to the need to confront evil, once echoing almost verbatim comments President Bush had made at Auschwitz on May 31, 2003, less than seven weeks after the fall of Baghdad. The death camps “remind us that evil is real and must be called by name and must be opposed,” Bush said, evoking the more recent horrors of Saddam Hussein’s regime.
For all the potential parallels, the White House chose to leave them unspoken this time. Cheney’s staff considered and quickly rejected a proposal to use the trip for a major policy statement about the war on terror and global democracy. But the sweeping themes of Bush’s inaugural address were present in Cheney’s remarks, expressed in subtler tones. “In every generation, free nations must maintain the will, the foresight, and the strength to fight tyranny and spread the freedom that leads to peace,” he said at a reception for survivors of Auschwitz on Wednesday.
Russian president Vladimir Putin, who won sustained applause at the same forum when he said he was “ashamed” of the continuing anti-Semitism in his country, compared the Nazi threat to today’s terrorism. “Today we shall not only remember the past, but also be aware of all the threats of the modern world,” he said later at the Auschwitz memorial. “Terrorism is among them, and it is no less dangerous and cunning than fascism. . . . As there were no ‘good’ and ‘bad’ fascists, there cannot be ‘good’ and ‘bad’ terrorists. Any double standards here are absolutely unacceptable and deadly dangerous for civilization.”
The ceremony ended the same way it had begun–with the deafening screech of a train. Then the tracks were set ablaze in the snow, and a tower of light reached from the ground to the sky.
Stephen F. Hayes is a staff writer at The Weekly Standard.
