Sam Fireman survived the Holocaust in part to honor his younger brother. Aaron Fireman died after blowing up a crematorium in a show of defiance at Auschwitz.
“He told me to stay alive and tell people what happened,” Sam Fireman said as he left the Colorado Senate chamber Tuesday.
Fireman spoke after state legislators passed joint resolutions condemning the current genocide in Darfur, Sudan, and declaring April 15-22 Holocaust Awareness Week.
The tale of Nazi concentration camps needs telling at least once a year because of what the Fireman brothers suffered. Among other things, Sam was forced to collect the bodies of those who died in Dr. Josef Mengele’s medical experiments.
“My heart was like steel,” said Fireman, 93.
My heart was like mush when I passed through what’s left of the Dachau concentration camp recently. It’s hard to explain why without pictures. So I invite readers to go to my blog. It’s at blogs.denverpost.com/spencer. Scroll to the bottom where it says Jim Spencer’s Photo Galleries. Put on some earphones. Then click on the gallery marked “Dachau,” watch the slide show and listen to the voice-over.
When you’re finished, I hope I will have explained why Fireman’s presence at the General Assembly mattered so much.
The speeches given by Sens. Brandon Shaffer, Ken Gordon, Shawn Mitchell and Josh Penry on Tuesday were heartfelt. But nothing speaks to the evil of the Holocaust like staring at crematoriums similar to the one Aaron Fireman gave his life to destroy.
When Shaffer told colleagues that Coloradans should use this week “to teach the Holocaust as a human tragedy,” he wasn’t exaggerating. Even as thugs hack people to death in Darfur, even as the nation reels from 32 murders at Virginia Tech, the worst shooting in modern U.S. history, lessons of a horror that ended 62 years ago need to capture attention.
Sen. Suzanne Williams read a journal entry from a student who last summer toured the Majdanek concentration camp in Poland.
“It is sick how close the camp is to town,” the student wrote. “How did people sleep at night?”
You could ask the same thing at Dachau, where the town abutted the rotting core of human malevolence while its residents refused to acknowledge the stench.
Gordon said he used to ask his father about the Holocaust.
“Dad,” Gordon would say, “how did this happen?”
“Hitler was a madman,” Gordon’s father would reply.
It cannot be that simple.
“How can it be that a whole nation will follow a madman?” Gordon asked his Senate colleagues.
Each of us gets to answer – and answer for – that one.
“Fear of ‘the other,”‘ Gordon said. “Leadership has used it in every society. When there’s fear, leadership tells you, ‘We can save you.’
“In the U.S., we’re not immune to these manipulations.”
Surely not in incremental ways.
First, we learn to fear someone for the color of his skin, his religion, his clothes, his culture, his accent or where he came from. Then, we learn to hate him for being different from us. Finally, we learn to blame him for our problems.
“When fascism comes to the U.S.,” Gordon reminded, “it is not going to look like Adolf Hitler.”
Wherever fascism succeeds, it eventually looks a lot like the reflections in individual mirrors.
Whatever else is happening around us, the Holocaust continues to challenge us personally.
“This is the definition of bad,” Shaffer said of the slaughter of millions of Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, war prisoners and political dissidents. “It reminds us of the terrible things human beings have the potential to do to each other. It causes us to think: ‘What would I have done?”‘
That is not a rhetorical question. It never will be.
Jim Spencer’s column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at 303-954-1771, jspencer@denverpost.com or blogs.denverpost.com/spencer.
