Arbeit Macht Frei
When the sign Arbeit Macht Frei was stolen last week from the gates of the Auschwitz in Poland, millions of people all over the world realized that we had lost something much more. We had lost one of the most recognized icons of injustice and cruelty ever forged by man. A symbol that until it was taken we had taken for granted. Everyone says the sign is a reminder of the million plus Jews and other undesirables who were killed in the gas chambers. But when the sign was stolen, I was reminded that the prisoners were forced to make it themselves, and it became clear to me that it represents those who marched through those iron gates alive, not on the way to the gas, but on their way to the camps. The lucky ones. Rena Kornreich was 22 when she looked up overhead and saw the lie: WORK SETS YOU FREE. “We are young. We can work. We will see what happens,” she remembers. An hour later, she was tattooed 1716 and the next three years of her life were determined. “Work did not frighten me. I was a farmer’s daugther. I knew how to work. But this, this was not work. This was designed to destroy the spirit, first; the body, second. That first month, the SS had not figured out what their slaves should do yet. “We had to form a line across the field and toss bricks from one end to the other. If you didn’t move fast enough, you got a brick on your foot. In no time our hands were cut and bleeding. The next day we had to move the pile of bricks back across the field. Four times, we moved it back and forth. You did the work because you would be killed if you did not do it, but the work would kill you too.” Rena survived an unheard of two years in Birkenau and knew all too well that the only freedom promised by Arbeit Macht Frei was the freedom of being worked to death. With barely enough food to sustain them, men and women alike, worked hard labor, slave labor. They sifted dirt from gravel, hauled lorries full of clay and sand through the mud, mixed the dirt with water to make bricks that would make more blocks to house more prisoners, who would also sift dirt and haul lorries and starve. It was not just gas chambers that swallowed the Jews of Auschwitz, but the many others who died of starvation, beatings, exhaustion. It is these poor souls that the sign ARBEIT MACHT FREI truly pays tribute to–the nameless workforce, identified only by the numbers on their arms. The lucky ones. It is easy for us to point fingers at figures with too many zeros and to shake our heads at the horrors of genocide. It is harder to winnow through the rubble of the past and remember those who worked silently through the worst of it, working and praying for liberation, only to find another morning role call, the death march, another camp… In 1992, Rena Kornreich returned to Auschwitz and had her picture take under that bit of ironic iron–in the photo she looks as if the weight of memory is dragging her back in time, but she was able to walk out of the camps that had robbed her of her youth, finally free. It is her history and the other survivors’ histories that have been restored and preserved by the retrieval of the sign. Without that sign, mocking us from its inglorious past, how can we remember that compassion is the greatest gift we can give one another? And I choose to believe that its rescue is another sign, this season’s holiday miracle. # # #
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