October 7, 1944, the Sonderkommando started a revolt in Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Sonderkommando was a specific unit of prisoners. As transportations of Jews arrived at the platform, guards selected those they wanted in the Sonderkommando. The selected prisoners had to be young men, looking strong, because their work was extremely hard. The guards separated the men from other prisoners and gave them their own quarters by the Crematoria.
These young men worked at the very center of murder. They were situated right by the gas chambers and had various tasks associated with gas chambers and the Crematoria. This physical proximity to the murder meant that they could become dangerous witnesses. This was the reason that every few months the SS had all the Sonderkommando members killed. They selected new men from the arriving trains.
The Sonderkommando in 1944 knew that they were about to share the fate of everyone else.
But something was different. This Sonderkommando had started preparing for a revolt. Revolting had to take place before they would be killed. For months female prisoners working in a munition factory, had been smuggling tiny amounts of gunpowder to the men. The women were part of the camp resistance movement. The act was extremely dangerous, but the women managed to get this gunpowder to the Sonderkommando. The men in turn were planning to use it to destroy the gas chambers and the crematoria.
The revolt started indeed but the SS managed to quench it. The SS murdered almost 250 prisoners. Later the SS managed to find out, who had been smuggling the gunpowder, and they tortured and murdered four women.
Looking back from our perspective all this took place exactly 80 years ago. The diabolical hatred, inhumanity, and torture and murder of human beings produced a heroic act. But, incredibly, today 80 years later, we are still confronting this hatred. Even if the circumstances are different, there is something metaphysical that connects 1944 with 2024.
October 7, 2023, started something completely unprecedented in the history of humanity. As Hamas terrorists entered Israel with such ease and made their way to civilians and border communities, they tortured, they killed, and they murdered. Heroic civilians, off duty police officers, and other citizens had to show up and try to defend the communities. Others had to be in hiding, others witnessed terrible violence done to their families and friends. October 7th created heroes out of ordinary men women, young people and even children. Among them were even Holocaust survivors.
The eyes of the world initially were horrified to see what happened. Even the UN rapporteur said that she had never seen so much hatred. We all remember the photos of the hostages when Hamas took them into Gaza. Hostages looked back, and no help was forthcoming. Some photos were so horrific that they came with warnings. Although negotiations succeeded in that some of the kidnapped came back to Israel, and IDF, the army, located and rescued more, there are still over 100 people missing. Some of them are presumed to be alive in Gaza.
The army had to enter Gaza, not just to find the murderers, but to destroy the weapons storages under civilian homes, hospitals, and kindergartens. Many of the smuggling tunnels started inside civilian homes. In some cases, bodies of kidnapped Israelis were found in regular homes. Hamas hid weapons even hidden in children’s rooms. Hamas released videos where you can see incredibly young boys carrying guns and firing them in the air whilst the terrorists are rejoicing and laughing. Humanitarian aid was not reaching its recipients because Hamas took it.
Hamas is responsible for the destruction of Gaza, but this thought is incomprehensible to much of the world.
The new trend is that our Western world, including America, is at the forefront of a campaign of anti-Israel hatred. The antisemitic hatred in the streets, universities and much of the institutions of the Western world is shocking. There is no shortage of people defending terrorist organizations and their murderers. It seems that even without knowing anything about situation itself, many people are instantly ready to take the side of Hamas and even Hezbollah. The latter terrorist group even posted on Instagram about their defenders in the western world. Hezbollah is proud of them.
What does this mean?
Is this an instinctive, almost inherited way of expressing ancient and long rooted anti-Semitism? How come antisemitism is still so prevalent in much of the world? Is anti-Jewish and antisemitic trend even a way of being anti-God? With their slogans, flags, and complete lack of information about what is going on in the Middle East, the demonstrators only have instinct and unchecked emotion. But this is a troubling trend. Without facts it is easy to be taken by the crowd and to start on a dangerous path of lies. Our young people are lost without truth and accompanying decency.
October 7th has shown us that when people believe lies, they are willing to go at great lengths to defend their positions. We need to counter that with information and truth. We also need to counter it with prayers.
Something comes to mind from the 1940s. In occupied Warsaw during WWII, a young man chose to fight in the Armia Krajowa, the Polish Home Army. This man later became a Catholic priest. In the 1940s, as people were disappearing and increasingly dying, he wrote words, which are so fitting at this time. Let us think about this poem on October 7, 2024.
’Let us love people
Now they leave us so fast
And the ones who don’t leave
Won’t always return
And you never know while speaking of love
If the first is the last
Or the last one first…’
- Jan Jakub Twardowski (1915-2006)
