Sermons in stone speak from Treblinka
TREBLINKA, Poland — The earth here is unquiet. Wind and rain, and insects and small burrowing animals stir the sandy soil, bringing to the surface small white and gray substances.
They are flecks of compressed ashes, and bits of bones. In a circle 15 feet in diameter, a visitor to this site of a Nazi death camp sees on the grounds parts of an adult's finger and a child's rib.
Recently an American delegation was here and at other Holocaust sites to receive artifacts from the Polish government. They will be permanent exhibits at the Holocaust Memorial Museum that will open adjacent to the Mall in Washington in 1992.
One such artifact is freight car 11688. This 27-foot cattle car was used on the 60-mile shuttle — trains of 60 such cars, each car carrying 100 Jews — between the Warsaw ghetto and Treblinka.
Some said that literature itself would be the final victum of the "final solution," that imagination must flag and words must fail in attempts to encompass it.
Not true. There can be sermons in stones, as in the shattered bricks and masonry that are the shards of the Warsaw ghetto, taken for the Museum from just a few inches below the surface of rebuilt Warsaw.
George Will
Also coming are 2,000 of the 820,000 pairs of shoes piled to the rafters of Majdanek barracks.
More than 10,000 artifacts have been received from survivors in America and elsewhere in response to an appeal. They will be sifted for suitable displays in a building designed by the firm of I.M. Pei, a design of solemn commemoration but also evoking the industrial nature of the crime.
It has been said that we make our buildings, and then they make us. The Museum will make memories for rising generations, expanding their consciousness of the awful possibilities of human action.
Thus it will be, fundamentally, a museum serving philosophy. It will start from extreme particularity — shoes, bricks, canisters, an event: Hitler's war against the Jews. However, it will stir visitors to the most general reflections on the nature of man and the great questions of governance.
The cooperation of Polish authorities with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council has been overshadowed by the controversy concerning the establishment of a Catholic convent at Auschwitz, in a building originally used to store Zyklon-B.
Cardinal Glemp, who wants to abrogate the agreement by which the convent was to have been removed by now, is a useful anachronism. He is a living museum exhibit of lumpen anti-Semitism (Jews are cosmopolitan outsiders, they control the mass media, they are responsible for anti-Semitism.)
Lumpen anti-Semitism made possible the seizure of power by virulent anti-Semites.
Without questioning the good motives of the nuns, who wish to pray for all victims, Jewish leaders rightly see the convent as yet another act having the effect of diminishing the Holocaust, sinking it back into the stream of history by blurring its monstrous clarity.
That clarity is a function of the Holocaust's particularity: All the resources of a modern state were turned toward the destruction of one people, the Jews.
Yes, others were killed. But if there had been no Jews in Europe, there would have been no Holocaust. There would have been no Hitler. No Treblinka.
At the peak of its frenzy, Treblinka was the worst of the Nazi works. In an area you can walk across in 10 minutes, they probably killed more people than live today in Cincinnati. Here, there was not as there was at Auschwitz, an atom of demonic utilitarianism in the form of slave labor for industry. Here, the slaughter was single-minded.
At Treblinka one sees...nothing. And everything.
Nothing, in that the Germans tried to erase every trace of the camp. All that are here are memorials — rough-hewen stones for each Jewish community annihilated — and ashes and bones. And a silence. A curator says birds do not sing here. I believe him.
But here you also see everything. Treblinka is the starkest testimony to the radical evil that gives the Holocaust its stunning uniqueness, its apartness from all other human experiences. The radicalism was in its furious focus on Jews.
There would have been no Holocaust if there had been an Israel — a haven.
Standing in the doorway of a prisoners' barrack at Aushwitz-Birkenau, it is stirring to see far across the camp, through the stubble of brick chimneys that are all that remain from any wooden barracks, the blue and white flag of Israel borne by young Israeli visitors.
Architecture, it is said, is frozen music. The Museum wil not be a dirge. It will be an anthem to the resilience of a people, and of people.
(c) 1989, Washington Post Writers Group
