I’ve been listening to coverage of Holocaust Day on BBC Radio and elsewhere. A lot of the coverage rightly centres around the stories of brave survivors who somehow lived to tell their stories of life and death at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
I heard no mention of the camps whose only function was murder soon after arrival of the trains, the Extermination or Death Camps built for the Nazi’s Aktion Reinhard plan: Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka.
Why is this? I want to try to address this question.
In Concentration Camps like Buchenwald and numerous others, dehumanisation and ‘death by work’ was the goal. The Nazis wanted a financial outcome to run alongside their goal of genocide. This required inhumane care and lodging, but as a result there were buildings and other physical records of life and death at the camp.
For those of us trying to make sense of this still recent horror, it also meant that the few that did survive could offer some kind of hope. An emotional release from the darkness. In the words of Primo Levi “To survive is to defy those who would wish to see you erased from existence.”
The greatest focus is naturally on Auschwitz-Birkenau, which was numerically the most deadly of the camps, but it is also unique in having been both a Concentration Camp and an Extermination Camp. This creates an ambiguity about how to talk about this particular camp. It can be difficult to navigate (and explains why some commentators refer to it as a Concentration Camp and fail to mention the Extermination part). It can also enable Holocaust deniers to create their own wicked narratives.
As Channel 4 News tonight said, the story of the holocaust was not a story of those that lived, because the norm was that most died: the mass shootings all over Europe that preceded the camps (often eagerly supported by local antisemitic neighbours), and the build-up to the industrialisation of genocide. In all, the Holocaust created six million stories of lives brutally taken.
Laurence Rees remarked on the lack of attention to the purely Extermination Camps in his seminal book on the Holocaust (Auschwitz: The Nazis & The ‘Final Solution’, BBC Books, 2005):
“Visitors to the sites of Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka (of who there are far, far fewer than travel to Auschwitz) are shocked by how tiny these killing camps were. A total of around 1.7 million people were murdered in these three camps – 600,000 more than the murder toll of Auschwitz – and yet all three could fit into the area of Auschwitz-Birkenau with room to spare. In a murder process that is an affront to human dignity at almost every level, one of the greatest affronts – and this may seem illiogical unless you have actually been there – is that so many people were killed in such a small area.”
I simply think that news outlets, and most of us actually, find it simply unbearable, and beyond our comprehension to even think about the monstrosity of the industrial murder of so many. Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka seem to leave a blank space in our historical remembrances, because there are apparently no stories to tell of survival amongst the horror, only a blank sheet. Yet even that is not quite true.
One of the most remarkable stories of survival was the ‘Treblinka Revolt’ by Samuel Willenberg and many others, on the 2nd August 1943. These were victims who actively rebelled, with great purpose and planning, against their enforced passivity.
Why is this story not told each year?
Even while their numbers were small when tallied against the huge numbers that were murdered, we see in this story a willingness to stand up and be counted. A lesson to all of us who have infinitely more agency to confront hate and division.
Ultimately, the Nazi’s were confronted and defeated in their war against humanity, and there lies hope too. The good guys won.
Those who seek to divide in the name of an ideology, to achieve absolute autocratic power, will always dream of some distorted vision of a homeland: one that is ‘cleansed’ and made uniform in many ways, even in terms of artistic expression. These people hate diversity.
Yet we know that nature is most successful at its most diverse. Monocultures wither and die. Human society is no different. David McWilliams’s recent brilliant book ‘Money – A Story of Humanity’ gives numerous examples of how cultural plurality provides the spur for wealth and happiness. The cultural monoculture that Hitler dreamed of led to destruction not hope and happiness.
Is hope possible in the shadow of the Holocaust?
Assuredly it is, because humanity has shown that open societies with cultural diversity are the most successful, providing the basis for wealth and happiness. We must continually work to make this a reality, in our own time, faced with the latest incarnations of monoculturalists and autocrats. History teaches us that open, multicultural societies will always prevail in the end, and are worth defending.
Hope depends on it; depends on us.
(c) Richard W. Erskine, 2025
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