Commentary: The prevention of genocide is achievable

By James Waller

Zalman Gradowski, a Jew from Luna in the district of Grodno, on the border of Lithuania and Poland (present-day Belarus), arrived in Auschwitz on the morning of Dec. 8, 1942. Upon arrival, his mother, wife, two sisters, brother-in-law, and father-in-law were taken immediately to the gas chambers.

Gradowski, an able-bodied man, was assigned to the Sonderkommando squad, the prisoners who serviced the crematoria by pulling out the bodies, plundering the corpses, burning the remains, and disposing of the ashes.

There, "living at the very bottom of hell," Gradowski became one of the organizers of a prisoner revolt in Crematorium IV at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Having learned that the SS was going to liquidate much of the squad, the prisoners blew up and set the crematorium on fire. It would never again be used for gassing.

Three SS officers were killed and 12 were wounded. Four hundred and fifty-one members of the Sonderkommando were killed in the rebellion and its aftermath, including Gradowski, who was cruelly tortured and then hanged.

On March 5, 1945, the Soviet Commission for the Investigation of Nazi War Crimes found a manuscript buried in an aluminum canteen near Birkenau's ruined crematoria. The journal had 81 numbered pages, and its author, Zalman Gradowski, attached a letter dated Sept. 6, 1944, one month before the rebellion.

Having lost all hope of surviving, Gradowski wrote that he had buried the journal "under the ashes, the most certain place where one will excavate in order to find traces of the millions of murdered people."

Today, in a permanent Jewish exhibition recently opened in the original brick, two-story former barracks of Block 27 of Auschwitz I, visitors are confronted in the entranceway with these words from Gradowski's unearthed testimony:

"Come here you free citizen of the world, whose life is safeguarded by human morality and whose existence is guaranteed through law. I want to tell you how modern criminals and despicable murderers have trampled the morality of life and nullified the postulates of existence."

As we observe Holocaust Remembrance Day, we recognize that genocidal destruction is not an easy story to tell, nor is it easy to hear. It is, though, a story that must be told and heard if we are to have any hope of reclaiming the morality of our collective lives and the very postulates of our shared existence.

Today - as atrocities impact hundreds of thousands of civilians in Syria, Iraq, Burundi, the Central African Republic, Sudan, South Sudan, Burma, and elsewhere - we remain faced with the urgency of a world intent on tearing itself apart.

The world as it is now, though, is not the world as it has to be.

As ubiquitous as genocide seems, it is a human problem and, as such, has a human solution. This is not a quixotic utopian statement about human perfectibility. It simply is a statement that we can, at least in large part, undo a problem that we have created.

At its root, genocide happens because we choose to see a people rather than an individual person, and then we choose to kill those people in large numbers over an extended period of time.

In the midst of that bad news, the good news is that we can make another choice; we can find constructive rather than destructive ways to live with our diverse social identities.

Preventing genocide is an achievable goal. Indeed, there is increasing interest and a growing literature outlining the ways in which we can prevent genocide in the belief that such knowledge will help shape our will do to so.

My own goal as a teacher, writer, and researcher is to present an analysis of genocide in the modern world that draws out the lessons to be learned in preventing genocide from ever taking place, preventing further atrocities once genocide has begun, and preventing future atrocities once a society has begun to rebuild after genocide.

It is also my hope to encourage all citizens, scholars, experts, and nonspecialists alike to understand the need to be engaged, well-informed, and involved when necessary - and to understand the difference between being a bystander and being an "upstander" in the face of genocide. That's because it is important for all of us to think more deeply and more broadly about a human-rights issue for which there are no sidelines, only sides. We must consider our role and responsibility as citizens in a world in which far too many civilians live in fear of being killed.

If each of us can begin to see our brothers and sisters in the world community, no matter how far from our doorstep, as a priority in our values and life choices, then perhaps we can ensure that "Never again" means far more than "Never again will Germans kill Jews in Europe in the 1940s."

James Waller is the Cohen Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Keene State College in New Hampshire and the author of "Confronting Evil: Engaging Our Responsibility to Prevent Genocide" (Oxford University Press), which will be published on May 24. jwaller@keene.edu