Roy Exum
Throughout history there have been some really bad people. The absolute-absolute on my personal list of vermin – this on the fourth anniversary of Osama bin Laden’s Waterloo in Pakistan – is a German soldier named Rudolf Höss. I discovered Hoss in 1961 when, at age 12, my dad took a fistful of the boys in the neighborhood to watch the movie, “Judgement at Nuremberg.” I shook for a week.
After the movie I remember we were all shell-shocked; we knew nothing about real-life atrocities and Dad took us to George’s Hamburgers, the five-for-a-dollar dive that used to be on Cherry Street and explained the Nazis, the horrifying Auschwitz concentration complex, and how millions of precious and innocent Jews were mass murdered.
Needless to say we spent a lot of nights after that with the Encyclopedia Britannica, the beloved Jewish author Leon Uris, and any other books we could find.
So it was that Obersturmbannfuhrer Rudolf Franz Ferdinand Höss became the greatest symbol of evil I have ever known or have since ever discovered.
Lt. Col. Hoss was the commandant of Auschwitz in Nazi-occupied Poland. When he and his family fled after Germany’s collapse, the Brits caught him and, after beating him half to death, he appeared at a War Crimes Tribunal and his affidavit actually read, “I commanded Auschwitz until 1 December 1943, and estimate that at least 2,500,000 victims were executed and exterminated there by gassing and burning, and at least another half million succumbed to starvation and disease, making a total dead of about 3,000,000.
“This figure represents about 70% or 80% of all persons sent to Auschwitz as prisoners,” it read, “the remainder having been selected and used for slave labor in the concentration camp industries. Included among the executed and burnt were approximately 20,000 Russian prisoners of war (previously screened out of Prisoner of War cages by the Gestapo) who were delivered at Auschwitz in Wehrmacht transports operated by regular Wehrmacht officers and men.
“The remainder of the total number of victims included about 100,000 German Jews,” he told the court. “Great numbers of citizens (mostly Jewish) from Holland, France, Belgium, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Greece, or other countries. We executed about 400,000 Hungarian Jews alone at Auschwitz in the summer of 1944.”
Hoss described how he could kill hundreds of people in 10-13 minutes (“You can tell they are dead when the screaming stops.”) and said the Germans could never figure out how to get a human body to burn up faster than two hours.
Four days before he was hung from the neck on April 16, 1947, he got a sudden case of “jailhouse religion,” stating, “In the solitude of my prison cell I have come to the bitter recognition that I have sinned gravely against humanity…I caused unspeakable suffering for the Polish people in particular. I am to pay for this with my life. May the Lord God forgive one day what I have done.”
I believe that Jesus Christ can forgive anyone, and that He died on the cross for Rudolf Hoss just as much as He did for me, but if I get to heaven and my right arm gets a new elbow, I’m a threat to still open a can of ratta-tat-tat on the most evil of all men who ever lived.
What got me on my soapbox is something that happened at Auschwitz last week because just as there are bad people, there are the wonderful as well. It seems some 17- and 18-year-old kids from Israel were in Poland, learning more about the horrible lessons I found out about a half-century ago, when an attractive lady approached them and said she had a yellow postcard for them from Germany.
The lady, who identified herself only as “Ruth,” had her sleeping baby in a harness on her chest and a single rose in one hand. When she got close, she peeled something off the card and put it on one kid’s jacket. Then another, and another, and suddenly the kids from Israel caught on, having been told the Nazis made Jews wear a yellow Star-of-David before they were rounded up in World War II.
“My people marked you with yellow stars and I brought this from Germany with love,” said the woman. “I cannot ask you for forgiveness of what my people committed to you, but as a sign of love and an outstretched hand, I would like to put a heart on the place where my forefathers have put a yellow star.”
The Israelis were deeply moved by her evident sincerity. “At first I thought it might be some type of game,” said Zvi Schwartzman, one of the teachers, but then he was told “Ruth” has been to the death camp now about 10 times. She treats it like a mission, leaving her other four children in Germany with her husband so she can come to apologize.
“That’s never happened to me before,” an adult chaperone told the teenagers. “Maybe her grandfather took part in the war…but why is she responsible? She’s asking, ‘How do I make up for what they did?'”
“Ruth” told the visitors she prays for Israel daily. “We see what’s happening with Iran and that we’re not far from history repeating itself,” she said. “Today, I can’t say for sure it’s not going to happen again, but I want you to know that you’re not alone and that there are people outside of Israel who are still standing with your nation and who pray for the peace of Jerusalem.”
Then she walked with her new Israeli friends, who all wore her yellow hearts, until they stood in the middle of what used to be prison barracks. It was there she said, in fluent Hebrew, mind you, “Welcome to the land of the living.”
Yes, there are evil people in the world. Thank God I’m still betting on the good ones.
royexum@aol.com