Dante’s Inferno is, in most minds, the image of pure human suffering where crimes of utmost evil are punished; Colonel Felix Sparks upon liberating Dachau wrote, “The sight stopped me in my tracks. Dante’s Inferno paled in comparison with the hell of Dachau.” Could it be that humanit

The typical Allied soldier’s emotion can also be summed up in the dairy entry of a prisoner in Dachau: “he (the American) stood in the middle of the bunk room, very embarrassed and awkward, only hiding his emotion with difficulty and scarcely able to hold back his tears. Then, with a determined gesture, he laid his sub machine gun on the table and went from bed to bed, embracing each of the sick men in turn. He did it very gently and cautiously, as though he might crush those fragile bodies with his strong arms.”

On 7th April 1944 Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler succeeded in escaping from Auschwitz-Birkenau. Making it over the mountains into Slovakia they made contact with the leaders of the Jewish community, but their reception was not what they expected. With exaggerated politeness the officials sat them down, asked for an account of their experiences and refused to believe them. And why should they? How could they? Human consciousness first had to be educated merely to take in the concept of mass murder on the scale of Auschwitz. The story fed by the Germans to the Jewish population of Europe was unfolding under the eyes of the questioners, the fairy-story of resettlement areas fell apart in their minds. And according to the two escapees, “it was an appalling blow for them.”

Through my research I have come across countless horrors, stories of harrowing emotion, reasoning behind mass death which could only seem to be the conclusion of a person devoid of their sanity. And how these acts have caused more suffering than ever imaginable in those years of violence, and up to this day where people still live with their anguish buried deep in their hearts, have left me questioning the human race on how it can be capable of such great evil, yet the people who suffer it can control their feelings. The view of Arno Lustiger, a survivor of the death march to Buchenwald gives us some insight, “I am incapable of hating in the abstract. I can only hate people who I know have done me some wrong. And even then, I can only feel the hate. There have been many emotional acts of hatred on the part of people liberated from concentration camps. I was never in that situation. I would have been incapable of committing murder, or anything like it. I had the opportunity; I was actually called in to question prisoners of war, German POWs. I could have acted viciously – but I didn’t. I valued myself as a human being. I was very grateful that I survived, and I never dreamt of doing to others the sort of things that were done to me.” This sentiment, I personally hope could be viewed by those with power in current times, but this overall will of human character brings hope to us all of how we can truly become at peace.

This question of conscience constantly reappears in the minds of all sides, and I feel the Jewish emotion can be summed up in the comments of Simon Wiesenthal: “In the first years after my liberation I could not sleep at all. My thoughts were always returning to those people I had lost. I had made no new friendships: my only friends were previous camp prisoners. The whole past was alive before my eyes, filled with the dead. For me the war was not over, because I told myself: they are all under the earth, but the ones who put them there are still living untouched, in every part of the world. There are people who were with me in the camps and for whom those events were like water off a duck’s back. But not me. There may be no longer an open wound, but there is a visible scar. I have a wounded soul, and I know that this can never heal. It is something I will carry around with me as long as I live.” This thought of a wounded soul, brings to mind Dante’s Purgatorio where Dante, guided by Virgil rises through the purification process of his soul, and his whole journey throughout the Divine comedy is echoed in the holocaust. People experiencing hell (the camps), the ultimate evil, being the only way to truly purify t

Some topics in this essay:
Police Battalion, Israelis Palestinians, Primo Levi, Purgatorio Dante, Americans German, Simon Wiesenthal, Max Eichhorn, Buchenwald Typhus, Ester Brunstein, Germans Jewish, concentration camps, police battalion 101, holocaust people, police battalion, primo levi, reserve police, reserve police battalion, battalion 101, german soldiers, hell damned, simply believe, damned seek,