To understand the Holocaust

To understand the Holocaust you have to approach. Flee from frills and rhetoric. Analyze the concepts, travel to the origin and examine it. That is why José Sánchez Tortosa, Fernando Palmero, Raúl Fernández Vítores and Alberto Mira Almodóvar define themselves as observers. Observers? Yes, those who, separated from an event, try to understand it from the classical methodology; undertake the search for material knowledge fleeing from the emotional charge. Because the feelings, they write in their new work, prevent a rational approach to the facts .

In The Holocaust Places (Editorial Confluences) - the third joint work of Tortosa, Palmero, Fernández Vítores and Mira Almodóvar -, the authors portray their journey through the six Nazi death camps built in occupied Poland and erected by the Croatian State Ustasha in Jasenovac. Thousands of kilometers of horror that, not to banalize, describe with the same linguistic economy used in their testimonies by those who were treated there as merchandise of death, stripped of their human condition through legislation and condemned to extermination and killed by their own State.

Significant of how the authors assemble their story is their criticism of "the emotional symbology" built in the place where some fields were built . They understand that certain monuments on the ground usurp the space of what happened, becoming a hindrance that deflects horror and, therefore, their understanding. Thus, in Auschwitz, "a theme park (...) a leisure center with bars, pizzerias and shops", tourists pass by block 11 ignoring that there was the first mass murder trial with Zyklon B ; perhaps ignoring by extension how Nazism put science at the service of genocide and surely ignoring the process of improving an "industrial experimental system for the disposal of human waste through the use of gas chambers and crematoriums" in which there was to overcome logistical problems such as improved drainage of human fat in ovens. A refined process to the point of turning 3,000 people to ashes in a span of less than two hours, as was the case in Sobibor, and based on the eugenic experience of the mentally and handicapped murder programs.

It is this condition, that of sobriety, that of crudeness, imperative to approach the Holocaust from the causes that for the authors complement the Judeophobic motivation of this exterminating event. That they are none other than the military and economic . With the war spreading more and more territory, the National Socialist regime shuffles various projects to create for its Aryan population the most perfect state of well-being. Thus, the Shoá not only responds to the ideological need of the German State to implement its political program, but to the economic need to implement its demographic program and help finance the war. Suffice it to point out that the plundering of the assets and heritage of the Jewish community that ended up in the coffers of the Third Reich served to finance 5% of the total expenditure of the war. The final solution was the starting point for the new purpose in order to purify the Aryan race and maintain an army that was deploying at a speed of vertigo. The establishment by the state of a model of annihilation on the part of the civilian population in which they participated, benefited or allowed other "human subjects". Because, let's not forget, "the Holocaust is a human act. Too human . "

To commemorate the Holocaust just a moment. Or a memorial. Or an exhibition. Or Schindler's list . However, to understand it ...

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

• culture
• Germany
• Poland
• history
• Adolf Hitler

StoriesThe terrible childhood of the great tyrants of the twentieth century

CultureThey discover valuable remains on the ship that moved the Parthenon marbles to England and wrecked

Archeology They denounce before the Prosecutor the "abandonment" of the Roman site of El Eucaliptal