Laurence Rees reflects on Holocaust characters’ insights

STEVEN GRUZD

On Sunday evening, Rees delivered the second annual Mervyn Smith Memorial Lecture at a packed Johannesburg Holocaust and Genocide Centre. He spoke movingly about four interviewees – victims and perpetrators – that illustrate the complexity of the human condition and the horrors of the Shoah.

Tadeusz Smreczyński, a Catholic Polish political prisoner held in Auschwitz in 1944 for smuggling bread to hungry prisoners, was in his 90s when Rees met him in Krakow. He recalled watching the Jewish camp orchestra playing for the SS and their families at Auschwitz: “They had no dilemmas. The wind from Birkenau blew the smoke from the death camp in, but they were just sitting and listening to Mozart and others. This is what a human being is capable of…”

Smreczyński was inspired to become a doctor if he survived, by watching prison doctors treating victims of Allied bombing raids.

A brilliant scholar, Smreczyński’s promising medical career was restricted, as he refused to join the hated Polish Communist Party after the war. He was forced to be an army doctor far away from his family, for six years. He said: “Life has sense only when one does good… I did not feel the urge to live a public life. I did not care about financial incentives that would let me compare my car with someone else’s car. I did not need to impress anyone.”

Rees interviewed former Auschwitz SS official Oskar Groening in 2004. He spoke candidly, unaware that he would later be prosecuted when German law changed. Currently 96, courts are deciding if he is too frail for imprisonment.

Unrepentant, Groening told Rees: “We were convinced by our world-view that there was a great conspiracy of Jewishness against us… what happened in the First World War must be avoided, namely that the Jews put us into misery. The enemies who are within Germany are being killed – exterminated if necessary… so we exterminated nothing but enemies.”

Of killing Jewish children, Groening said: “The children are not the enemy at the moment. The enemy is the blood in them. The enemy is their growing up to become a Jew who could be dangerous.”

Rees explained how the Nazis prized being “hard as granite”, relishing the chance to do something epic.

Petras Zelionka, a Lithuanian Nazi collaborator interviewed in 1994, said of killing Jews: “Everything short and clear. Without any ceremonies – nothing. We used to give them up for lost and that was it.”

Rees outlined motivations of Lithuanian perpetrators, including “revenge (against those who had allegedly helped the Soviets oppress the population); expiation (for those who wanted to show loyalty to the Nazis after collaborating with the Soviets); anti-Semitism; opportunism (a desire to adapt swiftly to the new situation in Lithuania); and self-enrichment”, plus sadism.

Zelionka said he felt a sense of “curiosity” as children were killed. “You just pull the trigger, the shot is fired and that’s it.”

Finally, Rees introduced Toivi Blatt, a Jew who worked in the Sonderkommando (a unit of prisoners forced to assist with the disposal of gas chamber victims) at the Sobibor death camp. Blatt harrowingly recalled the killing of a trainload of Dutch Jews: “When the job was finished, when they were already taken out of the gas chambers to be burnt, I remember thinking to myself that it was a beautiful night [with] the stars really quiet… Three thousand people died. Nothing happened. The stars are in the same place.”

Blatt told Rees: “My whole orientation, my thoughts, were how to survive. Because I will die, but right now I am alive and I don’t want to die today. And then the next day would come and I don’t want to die today either.” Blatt lived with guilt about the horrors he witnessed all his life.

Blatt said: “People asked me: ‘What did you learn?’ And I think I’m only sure of one thing – nobody knows themselves… All of us could be good people or bad people in these [different] situations. Sometimes when somebody is really nice to me I find myself thinking:, ‘How will he be in Sobibor?’”

Rees urged the audience not to judge how people behave in such extreme conditions. He said one of the problems with history is that we look back now, knowing what happened.

Asked if former SS men he interviewed showed remorse, Rees said he could not recall any.

Mervyn Smith, a revered Jewish communal leader from Cape Town and former chairman of the South African Holocaust and Genocide Foundation, died in 2014. Smith’s four children annually sponsor a prominent international speaker to lecture at the Holocaust and Genocide Centres in Cape Town, Durban and Johannesburg.