Seventy eight per cent of the Jews who had lived in ter­rit­or­ies that fell to the Nazis, perished. In com­par­is­on, between 1.4 per cent to 3 per cent of the non-Jewish pop­u­la­tion in the same territory was killed. Dynasties and entire families, great sages and common workers, Nobel laureates and humble students, whole villages and com­munit­ies, all dis­ap­peared. Thriving Jewish intel­lec­tu­al and cultural centres like Krakow and Vilnius that had bustled with Jewish life, now reduced to rude husks, urban memorials of human depravity.

How many more Freuds and Einsteins, Chagalls and Primo Levis were among them we can never know. A million Jewish children were killed. A million Anne Franks vanished in a pit of suffering. But the numbers obscure the millions of indi­vidu­al stories of cruelty, misery, and unbear­able loss. While the precise manner of the killings was so bestial that it forces one to recon­sider the very nature of humanity.

The Jews were taken to the camps in train wagons used for trans­port­ing cattle in which they would ride across the continent for days on end, com­pletely without food or water, sometimes given a pause so that the corpses of loved ones could be tossed out of the wagons before con­tinu­ing onward to the camps.

In some camps, the fit were put to slave labor until their bodies gave out while the very young, the old and the sick were selected for gassing imme­di­ately. The process of selection would take place on the platform imme­di­ately upon arrival. Nazi doctors looked over the human cargo, sending them to one queue or another, forever tearing sister from sister, mother from child.

The ones selected to die imme­di­ately were led into chambers which were sealed behind them before canisters of poison were released through chutes in the ceiling. When the victims ceased their writhing and their nervous systems succumbed, other inmates were charged with trans­fer­ring the dead to the crem­at­or­ia, clearing the chamber of visible signs of distress like bodily waste and fin­ger­nails clawed into walls, to ensure the next batch of victims would enter the chamber without disorder or res­ist­ance. At the peak of the killing, the Jews were killed at a rate of up to 15,000 people a day.

At Auschwitz, human exper­i­ments were conducted on the living, including determ­in­ing the time to death from injection with various poisons, the effect of removal of organs without anaes­thet­ic; and freezing victims to see how close they could be brought to the point of death and still be revived. If they survived the torture that mas­quer­aded as science, their only salvation was the gas chamber.

Those who were able to survive for any length of time in the camps existed in a realm somewhere between life and death, but surely closer to death. They ate virtually nothing, slept in barns and worked outdoors in the freezing Polish winter wrapped in rags, and were rife with diseases like dysentery and typhoid from mal­nu­tri­tion and the absence of clean water. Such was the deathly pall about them that rats sometimes attacked the still-living, mistaking them for corpses.

In the perfect crescendo to centuries of gradually reducing the humanity of the Jewish people, they were exterm­in­ated in purpose-built camps, indus­tri­al factories of destruc­tion, using a common pesticide, Zyklon‑B.

The seemingly infinite stories of infinite evil and suffering that together form the Holocaust have been presented to us over and over again in dis­pas­sion­ate his­tor­ic­al texts, in Hollywood films, novellas and memoirs. All seek and all fail to fully explain why human beings would act this way to their fellow man. What discord exists in the hearts of ordinary men and women that they would shed their humanity entirely, and seize with unre­lent­ing fury and purpose the oppor­tun­ity to dis­pos­sess, humiliate and destroy their neigh­bours simply because they were Jewish? This is the impon­der­able at the heart of the Holocaust. And yet as incom­plete as our powers to fully com­pre­hend this story may be, through the study of it, we develop an empathy, a greater humanity and an awareness of our own capacity to destroy.

Perhaps then, stories of Aus­trali­an school­chil­dren taunting their Jewish peers as “vermin” or of the insignia of Nazi killing squads being proudly displayed at nation­al­ist rallies, or the flag of the Nazi regime being hoisted in a Victorian town for all to see, can be consigned to the dustbin of history.