'Passion' Mute Next to Auschwitz's Quiet Power - WSJ Commentary

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The Real World

By CLAUDIA ROSETT

Krakow

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I'd come to Poland on other business, and gone to the movie because I was curious.

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What I had not anticipated was that "The Passion," in its frenzy to convey suffering, would inspire an urge not to weep, but chiefly to wince. Whatever faith or beliefs individual moviegoers may bring to the theater, what transpires in the film itself is a Hollywood marathon of dizzyingly bloody close-ups, some in slow motion, some moving along at a music video clip, all set to a hyperventilating score of hypnotic drumbeats and soaring chants.

It was a jarring contrast to a place I had visited earlier that same day -- a place of silence. Located about 40 miles west of Krakow, it is known to the Poles as Oswiecim. To the rest of the world it is better known by its German name: Auschwitz. There and at nearby Birkenau camp alone, some 1.5 million human beings were murdered, most of them Jews.

While Gibson's movie makes a killing, are we ignoring the evil that took place at Auschwitz and Birkenau?

So much has been said about Auschwitz that it may seem there's nothing to add. But some places need visiting by every generation, and not solely because there are crackpots such as Mel Gibson's father, Hutton Gibson, who would have us believe that the Holocaust was mostly fiction. We tend to remember the Nazi death camps as a sort of shorthand for evil. I wonder how many Americans contributing to "The Passion's" $200-million take at the box office could find Auschwitz on the map.

Today there is no Technicolor gore to be viewed at Auschwitz. There is no music-swollen soundtrack. There is a short black-and-white film; it documents a system designed to utterly dehumanize all those forced to enter. A guide explains that when the camps were liberated, some of the surviving children who had been used for experiments by the notorious doctor Josef Mengele answered only to numbers; they no longer knew their own names.

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The Nazis tried to blow up evidence of the gas chambers and crematoria before retreating. But you can peer down into the ruins of a room where prisoners undressed before going naked to the gas, and see remnants of a blasted chamber, softly topped with snow. Nearby are memorial slabs inscribed in various languages: "Forever let this place be a cry of despair and a warning to humanity. . . ."

I have never seen a place so evil.

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[Lars39]

1. Is there a link, please?

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2. Here

http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB107888881041051166-search,00.html?collection=autowire%2F30day&vql_string=Rosett%3Cin%3E%28article%2Dbody%29

But you will have to be a paid subscriber.

Let me know if you want me to email you the complete article.