A letter from Auschwitz to my Daughters - Brief Article - Column

TODAY, when you were at school, I drove across Silesia to a small town near Krakow. In Polish it is called Oswiecim. In all the other languages of the world it is called Auschwitz.

You will learn of the things that happened here. For the moment I do not want you to know. It is enough to say that about one and a half million people were murdered here. Most of them were Jews. I do not need to say much about what is here now. Auschwitz needs no adjectives, and even if it did need them it would not have them from me.

It is a place of lists. And so I need only mention a bolt of cloth woven from human hair; a mountain of shoes; ten thousand toothbrushes and mugs and saucepans; suitcases with names and addresses from all over Europe painted on them; a ramp by a railway line; some ruined ovens; a pond, black with ashes; a breezeblock wall between some huts with some candles burning at it; some showers in a concrete block which were never connected to the water.

There was a pile of children's clothes, and on it a dress which would have fitted Elizabeth well. There was a room full of women's hair, and amongst the hair was a single plait, like Sally has sometimes.

There were some people crying quietly at these things, and there were some people who were not. Snow fell on it all. The houses for miles around seemed guilty. The girl serving in the shop whistled along to pop music on the radio, and painted her nails. They say that the birds do not sing at Auschwitz, and they are right. But the poplars at nearby Birkenau grew strong and tall, and that seemed strange. A pall hung over it, and I did not want to breathe.

I do not know what all this means. I came here wise and I went away a fool. It is not that there are not lessons to be learned: it is that they seem too trite or too small, or simply that looking into the vast maw of Auschwitz freezes the capacity to draft nice propositions, or that the imperative of considering millions of individual sets of facts leaves no time or energy for generalities.

But I think, only because I am a father, that I ought to try to say something.

First the historical. I feel shabby about mentioning this, but after all Auschwitz was (sort of) historical, and so it must be all right. Auschwitz makes a Jewish state imperative. That has a number of consequences for the world in which you will grow up. Herzl, the Zionist visionary, was wrong when he boasted that he created the Jewish state in Basle. It was born in the crematoria of Birkenau. Auschwitz also makes a cruel Jewish state intolerable. That too has important consequences for your world.

Second: where did all these people go? I don't know. I am a Christian, and I don't know. But not just into the air, or into a pond, I'm sure. And not just into the memories of people who knew them and the memories of people who didn't. And they weren't just transmuted into principles, to be the tools of politicians and philosophers. They were too big for that.

Third: the (vaguely) philosophical. Auschwitz killed optimistic humanism. It was much more revealing that Auschwitz ever existed than that Auschwitz ceased to exist. But that does not mean what it is sometimes said to mean. The German philosopher Theodor Adomo wrote: 'No more poetry after Auschwitz'. He was wrong. You must make sure that he was wrong. When I was looking into the starvation cell, you were writing songs and dancing. Auschwitz means that symphony orchestras must be protected with all the might in the world.

Auschwitz means that nationalism must always be watched, and always subordinated to the demands of the smallest individual within any national boundary. No idea, however great, is worth a single human life: with one exception. Human life must often be spared in order to protect the very idea that no idea, however great, is worth a single human life. You must watch out for the many perversions of that caveat.

Of course there are many other reasons why Auschwitz matters (some of them very big, and some of them sounding like platitudes) -- reasons to do with living intensely, and looking hard at flowers, and saying sorry, and the importance of eating crusts, and many other things which should not be said in a published letter.

On my way out I bought a book of poems from the smiling girl in the shop. It was called The Auschwitz Poems and ran to 415 pages. I read them all. They all said one thing: that they did not understand. That is something worth stating.

Charles Foster is a writer who specialises in Middle Eastern affairs. His daughters are Elizabeth, 8 and Sally, 6. This letter was written to them to read when they were older.

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