Is History Really That Important?

Trigger Warning: facts about Nazi Concentration Camp atrocities.

So, I’ve been out of the loop for awhile. To make a very long story short lets just say that life got the better of my husband and I for a bit. So far things are still a little wonky but we are both doing our best to try and get things back to some sort of “normal”. But enough with my woes.

Now I will say, this is a bit “dark” for my first official blog post, but a necessary one. DON’T WORRY NOT ALL OF THEM WILL BE THIS HEAVY OF A TOPIC. I am of the opinion that this is necessary knowledge for everyone, for a variety of reasons I will discuss later in this post.

One night my husband and I were in our living room talking, and somehow got on the subject of World War II. My hubby began asking me questions and that gave my brain the automatic go-ahead to begin launching an onslaught of random facts from both my own brain and google-searching things I didn’t know. Honestly, until that point I hadn’t done too much research into the Holocaust and the Concentration Camp horrors of WWII. I mean, I knew about as much as anyone else. I knew it was awful. I knew that there was experiments, murder by gassing, and malnutrition. But I did not realize how bad it really, truly was. The extent to which people would (and still will) go in the name of hatred.

One very important thing to note was that this was not selective to only Jewish people, but sympathizers, those of the LGBT community, the Roma people (gypsies), POWs, and the mentally/physically disabled.

One of the first things my husband brought up was how malnourished the prisoners appeared in photographs. So I looked up what they were fed on a daily basis. Breakfast consisted of hot water with either an herbal “tea” concoction, or a grainy, fake, coffee substitute. Lunch was basically watered-down broth with occasional lump of potato or vegetable. Dinner was a small piece of black bread that was supposed to last them the night and the next morning until their noon broth. We did the math, they were eating less than 200 calories a day, if they got that much. The Nazi soldiers would also starve them for days at a time. But this isn’t even really the worst of it.

At Auschwitz, when the prisoners arrived, (after being rounded up and shoved into trains loaded well beyond maximum capacity), they were instantly separated into 2 different lines. One line went to the camps, where men, women and children were separated by gender, stripped of their clothing in exchange for prison uniforms, and shaved bald. Being prepped for a long time of torture, suffering, and death. The other line, however, were told they were being sent to “shower” and “delouse”. They were taken to chambers where they were forced to strip naked, and as many as possible were shoved into a small, dank chamber. (If you looked up you could see shower heads on the ceiling.) Once the prisoners were packed in so tightly they couldn’t move, the door was shut, and the lights went out. Zyklon B Cyanide pellets (that ironically enough was a pesticide) were then poured into hidden chambers behind the walls of the room, and hit with moisture to release toxic gas. Screams and mass panic would be heard coming from the room, and after anytime from 5-20 minutes, there would be a deafening silence. The bodies were dragged out, taken down to the crematoriums, burned and discarded. From 1943-1944 approximately 6,000 people were gassed A DAY. Survivors said that at times they would be taken for what the soldier said was a shower (which were in the same building as the gas chambers), stand in the room and close their eyes…when the drops of water began to fall on them they would breathe a sigh of relief, knowing they had survived another day.

Ilse Koch was the wife of SS Officer Karl Otto Koch, who became the commander of the Buchenwald camp that was near Weinmar, Germany. Her sickening obsessions gave her the nickname of “the Bitch of Buchenwald”. Not only was she brutal towards the prisoners of the camp, but she had a fascination with their skin. She got a Nazi doctor, Erich Wagner, to do experiments on the prisoners to see if there was a correlation to tattoos and criminal activity. The prisoners would line up naked and if she saw a tattoo that she liked, or thought was interesting, she would have that prisoner chosen for the experiment killed, skinned, the skin tanned and stored for use. Out of the skin, she forced the other prisoners to make purses, book covers, lampshades, gloves, and knife sheaths, along with using the dried skin as paper and who knows what else.

I could keep going. I could keep talking about the medical experiments done on twins, or the fertility/sterilization experiments on young women, or any other number of horrors that happened at those camps. But that is enough blood curdling atrocities for now.

You may be asking what the title of this blog has to do with anything I just talked about. For most people, reading something like this would probably make you think, “How is this important?”. And really. How does knowing things about history, whether atrocious like this, or more cheerful stories…make a difference in our lives at all? Now before you go thinking, “Great, thanks, this just made me depressed and nothing else.” Think.

Think about how you’re blessed to be where you are. After watching a Concentration Camp Documentary on Netflix and the film “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” in the same night, my husband and I were both in tears. I gripped him and hugged him so tight that I couldn’t let go for several minutes, my mind imagining us in those situations. We became so much more grateful of the time we are in, and the life God so graciously allowed us to live. Also, at the same time we had much more respect for the other people on this great planet and their past sufferings.

As I close I leave you with this. Let the past speak to you, give you encouragement and respect for all. Everyone has amazing past histories, both good and bad. Everything needs to be known, heard, and appreciated.

So…is history really that important? I think you already know the answer.

• REFERENCES:
• https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/gassing-operations
• https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ilse-Koch
• https://allthatsinteresting.com/ilse-koch
• https://biographics.org/ilse-koch-biography-the-nazi-bitch-of-buchenwald/
• http://auschwitz.org/en/
• Nazi Concentration Camps (Documentary on Netflix)
• Auschwitz Untold (Documentary on the History Channel)