'Death to the Left'

At the very moment on Oct. 3, when Hank Williams Jr. was on “Fox and Friends” comparing President Obama to Hitler, I had just entered through the gate of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration and Extermination Camp — one of Hitler’s masterworks — in the southwestern plains of Poland. Sounds implausible, but it’s true, and I’ve got alibis.


It’s not fair to contaminate the soul-contracting sorrow of an Auschwitz-Birkenau visit with the poison politics delivered in the battlebot baritone of Hank Williams Jr., but with his dopy Monday Night Football theme song now yanked from NFL broadcasts, it stands to reason his martyrdom will raise record sales.


If his music and persona bore at least a hereditary trace to his legendary father, you might be heartened to imagine Hank Williams Jr. would make haste and step up to the microphone to lay down a ballad on the brokenness of humanity staring himself. But whereas his troubled, cowboy-poet father sang with striking sensitivity of fortunes gained and lost in the tumbledown recesses of the American dream, Hank Williams Jr. sings as if he yearns only for all-you-can eat boneless chicken wings. So when you hear his nationally televised Hitler nonsense, you do begin to wonder what Hank Williams Jr. and some of his rowdy friends might be capable of if given the opportunity.

Aside from hugging my family after an eight-day, journalism-related trip to Poland, chastising Hank Williams Jr. is among the few things that have felt good. At my wife's family gathering Sunday, I’m asked about Auschwitz, but what do you say to the aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins sitting around the table? Where do you begin? With details of the grisly medical experiments the Nazis performed on children? Where?

I’m not sure yet. Maybe you just look for any opportunity to redirect conversation to that idiot Hank Williams Jr. or any other idiot of your choosing.

That Monday afternoon, Oct. 3, marked the only free block of time I had in Poland. The train jerks to a stop at the Oswiecim station. From there, you walk through a charmless neighborhood and think, "Really? People still live beside Auschwitz-Birkenau?" You'd figure it'd be set far off from humanity, like Stonehenge, the Mayan pyramids and many other man-man assemblages no amount of pondering can explain.

After you round an arborvitae hedge, the land opens up and you see a tall watchtower in the distance, a menacing presence with eyes in the back of its head. You soon come upon Birkenau’s “Death Gate.” You’ve seen it in photographs. A rail line stabs through its arch and continues as straight as anything you’ve ever seen before. You know where that rail line ends — between two buildings into which more than a million people (mostly Jews) were guided by soldiers who promised a soothing bath and warm meal but who offered nothing of the kind.

You step through the gate. The sky is blue, and — my — the place seems well-maintained, everything in neat rows like the graveyard back home where the kids learn to ride bikes. But, really, that’s baloney. The blue sky is permeable. It’s a peaceful overlay to horror. You’re here at Auschwitz-Birkenau, and all you have to do is close your eyes to hear the barking dogs and the heavy steel wheels and the iron-fastened railcar doors pulled open to expose all those faces who will soon encounter pure evil administered with fearsome efficiency.

You walk along the train tracks till you come to the end of the line between the remains of Crematoriums II and III. There’s a “monument” there. They call it a monument, but it's more of a gathering place to try to sort things out. At the moment, there’s a large group listening to talks. The speakers are trip leaders from a bus tour who speak from a script about how God is “mercy itself," and that “love sets the limit on evil.” Fine, but is this the place for such speeches? To give pat answers to inexplicable questions is to consign Holocaust victims to "extras" with non-speaking roles in a drama written by hacks.

Then a choir sings. Then, all is silent. Then from the crowd you hear a baby screaming, the most eloquent utterance you've heard all day — a scream as if read from notation drawn upon the stave of barbed wire.

After all this, you promise yourself that when you get back home you'll never complain about anything ever again. Ever.

Yesterday I read Hank Williams Jr.’s apology. He’s still a bozo, but his apology sounds sincere. And just as Obama ain’t Hitler, none of Hank Williams Jr.’s thoughtless political pronouncements can compare to the quick, cold calculations drawn at the unloading area inside the Death Gate where for years confused transports — mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, holding hands, desperately tending to one another — were ordered off railcars, separated and summarily subjected to the “selection” process. Those who seemed able-bodied for hard labor were set to one side. Those condemned to immediate death were corralled to the other.


The system was this: "Death to the left; life to the right." You know there are yahoos out there who would love it if Hank Williams Jr. used those words as a song title.

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