'Bawaal' row: A look back at the horrors of the Holocaust and Auschwitz

The Holocaust and Hitler are not topics to joke about or talk in a lighter vein. The filmmaker and stars of the new movie Bollywood movie Bawaal – director Nitesh Tiwari and stars Varun Dhawan and Jahnvi Kapoor – are learning this the hard way. The Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC), a Jewish rights group, has written to OTT platform Amazon Prime, asking the streaming service to remove the movie for its “insensitive portrayal” of the Holocaust. In its letter, it accuses Bawaal of trivialising the “suffering and systematic murder of millions”. “Auschwitz is not a metaphor. It is the quintessential example of Man’s capacity for Evil,” SWC Associate Dean and Director of Global Social Action, Rabbi Abraham Cooper, said in a statement. “Nitesh Tiwari trivialises and demeans the memory of six million murdered Jews and millions of others who suffered at the hands of Hitler’s genocidal regime.” And others, including film critics, agree. One movie review in a leading newspaper called it “the most insensitive film of the year so far.” As this controversy drags on, we turn back the pages of history and look at the horrors of the Holocaust and why Bawaal is, indeed, trivialising this tragedy. The Holocaust explained Around 1933, around nine million Jews lived in Europe, spread across the different countries. While many countries provided Jews with equal rights, in many Eastern European countries, Jewish life was kept strictly separate. When Adolf Hitler was democratically elected to the German parliament in 1933 and soon became chancellor, he turned centuries of casual anti-Semitism into genocide. Immediately after coming to power, the Nazis promulgated a variety of laws aimed at excluding Jews from German life. [caption id=“attachment_12927912” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] A medallion in the shape of the Star of David is shown after being discovered in the perimeter of a Nazi death camp in Sobibor. The Holocaust was a period in history during which millions of Jewish people (who Nazis identified using a Star of David, as seen in this picture) and other people were killed because of their identity. File image/Reuters[/caption] They began systematically shooting Jews and other people they deemed undesirable. They destroyed thousands of Jewish buildings and synagogues. Reports state that within nine months, these units, called the Einsatzgruppen, had shot more than half a million people. But this was not enough for Hitler and his Nazi officials. By 1942, they came up with the ‘final solution’ to the existence of European Jews – they would send the continent’s remaining Jews east to death camps where they would be forced into labour and ultimately killed. Interestingly, the word holocaust comes from the Greek holokauston, meaning “an offering consumed by fire”. From 1942, the massacres were consolidated into a programme of coordinated annihilation. And it wasn’t just the Jews that were rounded up and taken to labour camps and eventually killed. The Nazis also targeted other ‘undesirables’ – the Roma (‘gypsies’), disabled people and gay people. The Holocaust, a state-sponsored genocide, is said to have killed six million European Jews and another 200,000-500,000 Roma and Sinti from Germany and the occupied territories. Such was the devastation that the Jews also refer to the Holocaust as Shoah, which is Hebrew for ‘catastrophe’. Horrors inside labour camps The true horror of the Holocaust is reflected within the Nazi concentration camps. The first of these was built at Dachau near Munich in 1933. Later, five others — Auschwitz-Birkenau, Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka — came up and were designated as killing centres, with most having gas chambers. The majority of the killings took place at Auschwitz-Birkenau , located in occupied Poland. A complex of over 40 concentration and extermination camps, some survivors of the place have called it ‘a crack in the surface of the Earth through which hell could be seen’. According to reports, of the 1.3 million prisoners that were brought here, 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. [caption id=“attachment_12927982” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] The “Arbeit macht frei” (Work sets you free) gate is pictured on the site of the former Nazi German concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz in Oswiecim, Poland. File image/Reuters[/caption] The camp earned a reputation for sadism, depravity and as another survivor said, “The place itself is death.” There were no names here, just numbers and the Nazis killed in assembly-line fashion. The Jews and other undesirables were unloaded from train cars and “selected” into groups based on sex, age, and perceived fitness. Those who were not fit enough were killed in gas chambers immediately. The others had to do forced labour under barbaric conditions. The work was extremely hard, the little food was of poor quality, hygiene was poor, and Jews were often maltreated. This programme is therefore also referred to as ‘extermination through labour’. The Nazis also realised the large captive population could be used profitably before being exterminated. They decided to perform medical experiments on the prisoners before killing them. Sterilisation and castrations were carried out in large numbers. [caption id=“attachment_12928022” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] Hungarian women and children are walking to the gas chamber after their arrival at camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. Image Courtesy: Yad Vashem, Israel.[/caption] Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi in his 1947 memoir had written, “It is not possible to sink lower than this; no human condition is more miserable than this, nor could it conceivably be so. Nothing belongs to us any more…if we speak, they will not listen to us, and if they listen, they will not understand. They will even take away our name.” Till date, the horrors of Auschwitz stare us back in our faces. A visit to the camp reveals fingernail marks inside the walls of the gas chamber, marks of victims desperate to live. [caption id=“attachment_12927892” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] A man walks through the grounds of the former Nazi German Auschwitz death camp in Oswiecim, Poland. File image/Reuters[/caption] End of the Holocaust As World War II drew to a close in 1944 and 1945, Britain, the US and Soviet Union and allies made their ways across areas under the control of the Nazis and began to discover camps. The Nazis became aware that they were going to lose and tried to hide the evidence of their crimes by destroying the camps. Majdanek was the first camp to be freed in the summer of 1944 and soon on 27 January 1945, the Soviet Army even liberated the Auschwitz camp. And the Nazi effort to hide their crimes failed and evidence collected in these camps became the basis of the Nuremberg Trials, the first-ever international war crimes tribunal. Unfortunately for those who survived, the end of the war didn’t make it any easier for them. They were without homes and many were found living in the houses of strangers. Today, the Holocaust is perhaps the lowest depravity to which humankind has ever sunk. It was driven by an ideology of hatred, racial purity and superiority. With inputs from agencies