The horrors of the Holocaust and Auschwitz, trivialised by Amazon Prime’s Bawaal

The Israeli Embassy too has released a statement condemning the film and urging “”everyone who may not be fully aware of the horrors of the Holocaust to educate themselves about it.”

The Israeli embassy is disturbed by the trivialization of the significance of the Holocaust in the recent movie ‘Bawaal’.

There was a poor choice in the utilization of some terminology in the movie, and though we assume no malice was intended, we urge everyone who may not be…

— Israel in India (@IsraelinIndia) July 28, 2023

The Holocaust refers to the systematic state-sponsored persecution and murder of some six million European Jews by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime, between 1933 and 1945. The word ‘holocaust’ comes from the Greek holokauston, meaning “an offering consumed by fire”.

Historical context

Amidst the lingering effects of Germany’s World War I defeat and the crippling worldwide depression of the early 1930s, Hitler’s Nazi party rapidly rose to power, riding on a toxic mix of anti-semitism and nationalist fervour. After being appointed German chancellor in 1933, Hitler cracked down on all political opposition, curbed press freedom, and began persecution of ‘undesirables’: homosexuals, gipsies, the differently abled, and crucially, Jews.

Rail tracks leading into Auschwitz. The photo was taken by Stanisław Mucha after the liberation of the concentration camp in February/March 1945. (Wikimedia Commons)

The Jews were a small minority in Germany (less than one per cent of the country’s population) but were wealthier than most Germans. Hitler’s ideology deemed Jewish people to be the villains in Germany’s downfall: from its loss in the World War I to the economic precarity that Germans faced in the 1930s. He passed a number of laws restricting Jewish people’s civil and political rights and let Nazi party hoodlums run amok, terrorising Jewish communities.

In 1939, amidst ever-increasing persecution of Jews and a number of violent pogroms against them, including the infamous Kristallnacht – where mobs of Nazi thugs destroyed thousands of Jewish buildings and synagogues, and beat up and killed Jewish people across Germany and occupied Austria in 1938 – Hitler invaded Poland, beginning what would become World War II. This was a part of Hitler’s expansionist policy to provide the Germanic races with lebensraum or “living space”.

But this expansion also put a much larger population of Jews within Nazi-controlled territory. Poland itself had around 1.7 million Jews still living in its territories. Further expansion eastwards would lead to this number rising. For the Nazis, this was a problem: while they had forced most German Jews to emigrate to foreign shores, this was practically not possible to do in annexed countries with far greater Jewish populations.

The Final Solution

The Nazis thus came up with what they called “The Final Solution to the Jewish Question”: a plan for the systematic rounding up and genocide of millions of Jews. Simply put, the Nazis figured that if they were to get rid of the Jews, rounding them up and killing them would be more “efficient” than, say forcing them to migrate.

This began with increasing ghettoisation of Jewish people, which was followed by forced deportations. Millions were sent to concentration camps where they were made to do forced labour and kept in appalling conditions. Some of these camps were also equipped with sophisticated gas chambers which were used for the collective murder of Jews and other “undesirable” population groups.

Auschwitz

The largest and most infamous of such camps was Auschwitz, located in occupied Poland. It was a complex of over 40 concentration and extermination camps. Initially used as army barracks by the Polish, it was converted into a PoW camp after the Nazi invasion.

In the early 1940s, the Nazis significantly expanded the camp, bringing in at least 1.3 million prisoners to it through the war. Of these, at least 1.1 million perished while in captivity – in the gas chambers, through starvation and disease, as well as due to individual beatings and executions. Among the dead included were a million Jews, more than 70,000 ethnic Poles, about 20,000 Roma, and at least 15,000 Soviet PoWs.

The camp acquired a particular reputation for sadism and depravity due to the use of hardcore German felons as guards. These guards were notorious for physically and emotionally torturing the camp’s prisoners for their own entertainment.

The camp was finally liberated by the Red Army in 1945. Soviet troops entered the camp on January 27, a day commemorated since 2005 as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Today, the Auschwitz camp has become the most enduring symbol of the horrors of the Holocaust and is maintained as a memorial to it, for future generations to see and learn from.