Oskar Groening

Interesting read in today's paper and a thought-provoking take on a difficult sublect.

Seventy-five years after he was a Nazi soldier at Auschwitz, 96-year-old Oskar Groening is going to prison.

When I hear the excuses, I remember the faces. Of Lillian Taus, and Esther Lewand Cane, and Clair Goldstein. I remember staring into eyes that have witnessed the most unimaginable of humanity’s evils. Eyes that witnessed beatings and torture and starvation and sickness and extermination of innocent Jews and others by Nazis in concentration camps during the Holocaust.

Some define the Holocaust as systematic genocide, a term I believe fails to convey what a term like mass murder can.

I remember sitting across a table from the women — together with Taus and Lewand Cane at Abramson Center for Jewish Life in Horsham, and alone with Goldstein in her apartment at Ann’s Choice retirement community in Warminster — over the past several years. Though we were separated by just a few feet, I was keenly aware the divide between where I sat and where they’ve been cannot be measured in inches.

I’m thinking about those women today — the ones who lost freedom, innocence and family so many years ago — with the news last week that Oskar Groening, a Nazi soldier at Auschwitz, is finally going to prison. At age 96. Justice long delayed, but finally achieved.

Sentenced two years ago, lawyers for Groening have since argued he is too sickly and frail to be incarcerated. Given his complicity in the murder of 300,000 in the death camp, so many of them sickly and frail due to his hollow-hearted hand, is delicious irony. On Wednesday, a German court agreed with doctors who, in August, deemed him fit enough to be imprisoned.

Groening was among Lucifer’s henchmen, willingly marching in the preceding footsteps of evil the likes of which the world had never known. He admitted in a 2005 BBC documentary about Auschwitz he stood guard on a ramp where the selections for the gas chambers took place, and that he believed then that killing Jews, including children, “was the right thing to do.”

But, Groening has excuses. He argued he didn’t participate in the killings, so he should be off the hook. We know better. He and those like him are as responsible for the atrocities as those who herded the Jews into the chambers and bolted the door shut. As responsible as those who dragged the women from the gas chambers, cut off their hair and removed their metal dental work and jewelry. As responsible as those who placed the corpses in fiery pits or a crematorium. As responsible as those who ground victims’ unburned bones into powder and, along with the victims’ ashes, dumped them in rivers and ponds, or in fields as fertilizer.

The eyes of Taus and Lewand Cane may have at some point looked directly into the eyes of Groening, as all three were together at Auschwitz at one time. It’s not out of the realm of possibility that Groening may have been standing on that ramp outside the gas chamber when Taus’ mother, father and 10 brothers and sisters were led inside to die. Cane’s family never made it Auschwitz; her mother and five siblings were murdered before they were to board a train headed there from their native Poland in 1941.

Groening is old. But old does not mean innocent. A long time ago does not give him a pass. As Piotr Cywinski, the director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, points out, the biggest moral failure would be to avoid passing judgment.

Groening reasons he should not be persecuted because he was simply following orders as a soldier. But as I’ve written in the past regarding the Holocaust, everyone was following orders: Nazi soldiers from their superiors, and they from theirs, and so on up. So, we either absolve them all, except Adolf Hitler, or we hold them all accountable for their crimes.

And so, as another Holocaust criminal is led to justice, I think about Taus and Lewand Cane.

I think about Goldstein, who was imprisoned 3 1/2 years at Riga Ghetto, a Nazi working camp in Latvia, with her sister and mother.

I think about Tania Fink, formerly of Northeast Philadelphia, who at age 6 was imprisoned at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in early 1945 along with Anne Frank.

Fink’s paternal grandfather was burned to cinders at Auschwitz. At the same time a Nazi soldier named Oskar Groening was stationed there.

Just following orders.

Phil Gianficaro - The Intelligencer