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Bush warns of power of 'evil'
31/05/2003 22:38 - (SA)
Auschwitz-Birkenau - Mourning Holocaust victims at a former Nazi death camp, US President George W. Bush on Saturday evoked one of history's worst crimes to highlight the threat of modern-day extremism.
During a brief visit to Poland Bush, who has styled his war on Iraq and anti-terror campaign as a moral struggle of good against evil, remembered more than a million Jews and European prisoners exterminated at Auschwitz-Birkenau during World War II.
"This site is a sobering reminder of the power of evil and the need for people to resist evil," Bush told reporters after surveying the blackened ruins of a gas chamber at the complex outside the southern Polish city of Krakow.
"This site is a sobering reminder that when we find anti-Semitism, whether it be in Europe or anywhere else, mankind must come together to fight such dark impulses," Bush said quietly, with his wife Laura at his side.
"And this site is also a strong reminder that the civilised world must never forget what took place on this site. May God bless the victims and the families of the victims and may we always remember."
Bush walked through gates of Auschwitz, through which so many prisoners passed on a one-way trip, which still bear the mocking German epigraph "Arbeit Macht Frei" (work is liberating.)
Human pain
Later, in a speech to the Polish people, he reflected on how the camps, now memorials visited by thousands of people a year, still bore witness to human pain.
"They remind us that evil is real and must be called by name and must be opposed," he said.
"All the good that has come to this continent - all the progress, the prosperity, the peace - came because beyond the barbed wire there were people willing to take up arms against evil."
Ghoulish reminders of Nazi horror stand in the camp as a monument to human cruelty, from preserved gas chambers with ghastly cremation ovens, to the "Execution Wall" where naked prisoners were lined up and cut down by bullets.
Bush laid a wreath at the wall, yards from a dungeon under one spartan brick barracks block, where Nazi torturers sent victims to a "dark cell" ventilated only by a fist-sized window, where some prisoners suffocated to death.
Nearby are musty smelling cells where 600 Soviet prisoners and 250 sick Poles perished when Nazi guards carried out their first experiments with "Cyclone B" gas in September 1941.
Barbed wire and watchtowers
At the adjacent Birkenau site, crumbling gas chambers and the outlines of factories where scores of prisoners were worked to death, are ringed by barbed wire and watchtowers.
It was here that the Nazis refined their purge into a brutally effective killing machine - sending inmates herded into railway trucks from all over Europe straight to the gas chambers.
Rusting tracks and an abandoned platform now trace their route to death.
At times, camp guides say, the operation was so efficient that crematoriums were overwhelmed, forcing guards to torch thousands of gassed corpses in the open air.
"May your work inspire future generations to stand ever vigilant against the return of such unspeakable evil to our world," Bush wrote in the Auschwitz visitors book.
"Never forget."
Between 1940 and 1945, around 1.1 million men, women and children, a majority of them Jews, died here, along with 85 000 non-Jewish Poles, 20 000 gypsies, 15 000 Soviet citizens and 12 000 others.
The Soviet Red Army freed 7 500 surviving prisoners when it liberated the camp on January 27, 1945, but not before fleeing Nazis had frantically tried to destroy the evidence of their 42 kilometre-square killing zone.
- AFX
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