Regarding Auschwitz, everyone remembers Adorno's famous quote: "After Auschwitz, poetry ceased to exist." "Poetry no longer exists, but what lives on is reflection on Auschwitz.
But 60 years after Auschwitz, similar Holocaust tragedies have not disappeared from human history. As Annan noted at the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz: "Since the Holocaust, genocide in Cambodia, Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia has not been prevented or stopped in time. There are many similar horrific incidents of dehumanization taking place in today's world, and the international community should not be indifferent to them or even deny them. ”
Why? Can it be said that one of the reasons is that there are still too many "poems" and too little reflection. In addition to the anger at the atrocities and the mourning of the victims, is there enough reflection on the deep reasons why this horrific massacre occurred?
Xinhua News Agency reporter mentioned: According to the latest research results of historians at the Auschwitz Museum, a total of 1.1 million people lost their lives here in the four years of the concentration camp. But the report did not address the complex story behind the numbers. In fact, when I first visited Auschwitz in 1990, the nameplate here said "about 4.1 million people." In 1992, the nameplate was replaced by the "latest" results mentioned by the aforementioned journalists.
The figure of 4.1 million, or "at least 4 million," first appeared in a report issued on May 12, 1945, by a state committee set up by the Soviet Union, just over three months after the liberation of Auschwitz, and was mainly extrapolated from the "efficiency" of the killing facilities in the camps. For the next 40 years, in the countries of the Soviet system, this figure became an indisputable creed, and anyone who tried to re-examine the number was severely punished as "defending the Nazis" or even "neo-Nazis".
In the West, people are skeptical of this figure. Germans, who are deeply introspective about their own sins, mostly acknowledge this figure, while other Western writings generally say it is 1-2.5 million. Their bases are varied: testimony in post-war trial chambers, the difference between the number of people who came to Auschwitz and the number of survivors in various records, and the extrapolation of pre-war post-war censuses.
Some far-right, racists and neo-Nazis in Europe have made a big fuss about the lack of empirical evidence for the 4 million figures, describing the Auschwitz disaster and the entire Nazi atrocity as a "lie."
Serious scholars have a responsibility to clarify the truth of history. In this regard, Dr. Francisek Pepa, Director of the Historical Research Department of the Auschwitz Museum, has made an outstanding contribution.
As a Polish Jewish scholar and relative of the victims of Auschwitz, Pepa devoted almost her life to the pursuit of "true Auschwitz numbers." For 40 years, from 1965 onwards, he gathered extensive evidence around the world on the problems of European Jews, the Nazi movement, the Holocaust and concentration camps.
In 1980, a team he led concluded that a total of about 1.3 million unfortunate people, including about 1.1 million Jews, came to Auschwitz during the concentration camp's existence. Of the 1.3 million prisoners, 212,820 were transferred to other places of detention, 1,500 were released, about 500 escaped by chance, 8,000 survived to liberation, and the remaining 1,077,180, or about 1.1 million, were killed in concentration camps, of whom about 960,000 were Jews.
In 1991, Pepa's book Estimation of the Number of Prisoners and Victims at Auschwitz-Birkenau was published in Jerusalem to great acclaim, marking an affirmation of Pepa's research by Jews, the main victims of Nazi atrocities. The following year, the nameplate of the National Museum of Auschwitz-Birkenau was officially replaced.
Pepa's work is a combination of intellectuals' sense of justice, sense of social responsibility, and scholars' rigorous, objective, and realistic spirit. His correction of Soviet figures once led some neo-Nazis to think that there was an opportunity to deliberately distort and even fabricate Pepa's statement that "exposed the Auschwitz lie." Pepa was furious about this.
In a 1993 open letter to the University of Texas in the United States, Pepa declared: "I have dedicated my life to the cause of preserving the memory of the countless victims of Nazi atrocities as a warning not to disregard all forms of demagoguers of racial, religious and ethnic hatred who destroy justice, cause suffering and massacre innocent people." ”
Pepa also noted that the vast majority of Jews escorted to Auschwitz-Birkenau were killed as soon as they arrived, and only about 200,000 enslaved as slave workers were registered. It is therefore not surprising that the number of victims is far greater than the number of prisoners registered. Objective researchers cannot obtain evidence from the killer alone, and the value of the number of registers in the Auschwitz archives is that it proves that the number of victims in the concentration camp will not be less than 200,000, but neither logic nor fact can it be used to prove that there will be no more victims. Although the Soviet Union's figures at that time had a lot of moisture, but a concentration camp killed more than a million people, is not enough to lose conscience? ”
The great contribution of the Soviet Union to the defeat of the Nazis to the liberation of Auschwitz is always remembered by the Polish people and the people of the world, and it is entirely understandable to make a hasty estimate under the conditions of 1945. But it was not advisable to later prohibit people from studying and correcting them for propaganda purposes, and this unserious approach provided a pretext for the neo-Nazis to seize on the numerical flaws and deny the existence of the Holocaust.
This "digital lawsuit" is indeed thought-provoking. In fact, the figure calculated from the case file left by the murderer is as valuable as the number of 200,000 prisoner registrations left in the Auschwitz archives, but it can only explain the lower limit of the number of deaths and cannot be regarded as the number of deaths themselves, let alone negate the value of indirect inference.
How can you have a reflective attitude toward your own history if you are so full of things that happen to others, and even if others have reflected on themselves and are still covering up for others? If we have this attitude toward our own history, how can we afford to make others sincerely repent of their historical crimes?
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