Hab 3:12 Thou didst march through the land in indignation, thou didst thresh the heathen in anger.
The Long Journey Back to Oblivion
A long walk most of us consider to be between one and three miles depending on our
stamina and age. A walk of hundreds or even thousands of miles, is something almost imposssible
to fathom, and yet it happened many times during the Shoah. Called the Death Marches because so
few survived, these marches of columns of hundreds or thousands of Jews and other political
prisoners, became set in history as one of the greatest examples of the depths of depravity that
war and hatred/bigotry can cause us to degenerate to. The Death Marches in the Shoah took
place at several places and times and for more than one reason. Earlier in Shoah, long Marches
were used, for example in Hungary, to march men, women and children from larger population centeres
to the border of their nation. The Nazis, unmoved by human concern or kindness saw this as an
expedient move: it freed up train transports for their troops and other war efforts: the Jews
who were by far the target of the death marches were not just expendable to the Nazis, but their
demise was planned: if many died on the long marches, it was merely a matter of accounting to the
Reich. The Death March from Hungary was one of the events involving war crimes cited in Eichmann's
trial. While the numbers vary, most of these early death marches resulted in thousands of deaths,
including children. The reason for marching the Jews across national borders? Some countries
still had laws even late in the Shoah which protected their Jewish citizen's rights. If the Jews
marched across borders, they could be considered "Displaced Persons" and arrested, processed and
deported. In Hungary and France for example, citizen rights still prevailed over Nazi occupation;
the Jews could not simply be rounded up and deported due to too much paperwork and bureaucracy.
"Relocation" however, circumvented basic Civil Rights. The suffering in even these earlier marches
was intense: starvation, thirst, lack of hygenic care, clothing and so forth combined with physical
exhaustion beyond imagination and limit, caused especially the young, the weak and infirm and the
elderly to perish.
Beyond Human LimitsAs horrible as the earlier Marches were, the evacuation marches at the end of the War were even worse. As the war increased, all sides in WWII were extended in resources beyond their capacity. This was especially true for Germany who after two years on a bitterly cold and destructive Russian front, and trying to maintain occupied territories, was running on dust. As news of the encroachment of the Allied troops began to come, prisoners from such camps as Auschwitz-Birkenau and other killing centers were marched sometimes as far as central Germany. Even at the last threat, rather than leave prisoners, the Nazis tried to hold on to them for extermination: their grandiose social cause of Judenrein was a priority until the very end: if they could not dominate Europe and succeed in their establishment of the New Reich and a unified "New European Order" they would at least push to erase Jewish bloodlines from Europe. Most of the thousands of prisoners on the marches never survived and the reason is evident: even before the marches they were enslaved in cruel labor, and suffered starvation, malnutrition, disease and demoralization: in this emaciated condition, they were forced under arm guard to walk back to Germany. One survivor of one of the marches describes the ingenious ways they stayed alive. Not allowed to drink but on occasion, some would take spoons they carried and scoop snow falling from the shoulders in front of them for replenishment. To sleep, one survivor talked about covering themselves in the snow to stay warm: only the most tenacious and fit survived: the conditions were beyond human endurance. 3 In one march, there were by estimates as many as 50,000 souls: less than 10% survived.
The death marches were but one more
evidence of the total erasure of any common moral concern or benevolence during the Shoah. The
Jews were so depersonalized at that point, that to force them to unhuman limits was not even given
a thought. The extreme trying of the body was matched only
by the death march that confronted the soul of every Jewish soul.
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