THE CHALLENGE OF SCALE: January 27 is International Holocaust Remembrance Day—the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz in 1945.

The extermination camps were different. The Nazis built only six, and for just one overriding purpose: the destruction of European Jewry. The vast majority of the 1.1 million Jews deported to Auschwitz never entered its concentration camp at all. They didn’t last the few weeks that most other prisoners did. They lasted less than an hour. When their trains arrived, these Jews (and it was only the Jews who were brought this way) were pulled from the lethally packed cars, stripped, and separated into men, women, and children. A few adults were pulled aside if they looked healthy or were known to have special skills. The rest were marched a few hundred yards down the line to the gas chambers. The largest held 2,000 people at a time. They were made to look like showers, but the pipes were filled not with water, but with a delousing pesticide called Zyklon B. Once released, the gas took only 20 minutes to kill everyone inside. It took half a day for the Sonderkommandos (Jewish prisoners forced to run the crematoria) to haul the bodies upstairs to the furnaces for burning.

Dead within an hour of arrival and, the same day, nothing but ash in the air. Some 960,000 Jews died at Auschwitz. That is more than the total combined number of American deaths in every war fought since 1865. If buried in 5-by-8-foot graves (the average dimensions at Arlington National Cemetery), they would fill an area larger than New York’s Central Park. Their names would fill the panels of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial more than 16 times over.

But there are no mass graves at Auschwitz, no physical markers that convey the magnitude of what happened. All that a visitor can see are the ruins of a half-sunken gas chamber, which the Nazis blew up as they retreated before the Red Army. It is less than half the size of a regulation basketball court. There were six other such chambers at the camp— all together making up an area no larger than a high school gymnasium. One looks at their mangled ruins—some charred brick, a bit of twisted metal, an empty hole in the ground—and the mind reels. How could a million souls have disappeared into a space so small?

Human beings are simply not equipped to handle such a mismatch in scale. We need visceral guideposts and personal experiences to understand things emotionally. The Nazis exploited this truth to diabolical ends.

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