Real Nazis-- Revisiting Humanity’s Darkest Chapter

It is one of the simplest, yet most horrifying forms of punishment one can imagine: throw a prisoner into a dark, empty cell, lock the door, provide no food or water, and leave them to die. Auschwitz’s notorious Block 11–known appropriately as “the death block,” and full of “starvation cells”–was meant to punish prisoners with torture. It is hard to imagine being put in the Suffocation Room, designed to make individuals suffocate from lack of air, or the standing cells, tiny areas less than a square yard in which four people would be held and sitting was impossible. They would stay like that for days, leaving the cells to work a full day of hard labor only to return at night and be forced to stand. Many would die of exhaustion in the holdings, each of which had one tiny opening to let enough air in to prevent the prisoners from suffocating.

Yet the Jewish people—among so many others who experienced the horrors of Hitler’s Europe—endured. Indeed, many of the Jews who survived and left Europe for the United States or the soon-to-be state of Israel flourished—and many had been successful before the Nazis took power. Therefore, I was struck by the subtitle of David Cesarani’s new history of the Holocaust, Final Solution: The Fate of the Jews, 1933-1949. The word “fate” implies something inevitable, a series of events beyond the control of human beings.

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