[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 151 (2005), Part 1]
[Senate]
[Pages 594-595]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




            60TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE LIBERATION OF AUSCHWITZ

  Mr. FRIST. Mr. President, when Soviet troops reached Auschwitz in 
January 1945, they found only a few thousand thin, frail, emaciated 
survivors. SS soldiers, determined to carry out the final solution, had 
forced most of the surviving prisoners on a long death march into the 
heart of the Reich.
  As they retreated, the German forces destroyed most of the warehouses 
and many of the documents at Auschwitz. But what they left stunned even 
the battle-hardened Soviet troops. One soldier describes the camp's 
inmates as ``skin and bones [who] could hardly stand on their feet.''
  Soviet troops discovered hundreds of men's suits, more than 800,000 
women's outfits, and more than 14,000 pounds of human hair.
  One survivor recalls:

       What was Auschwitz? It was hell. Hell. A death factory. If 
     you weren't gassed, you were exhausted to death. If you 
     weren't exhausted to death, you starved. If you didn't 
     starve, you died of disease.

  It was at Auschwitz that Joseph Mengele performed his horrific 
experiments, injecting the hearts of live children with chloroform and 
performing all sorts of bizarre and vile surgeries on twins and 
pregnant women.
  It was at Auschwitz that the Nazi killing machine first discovered 
and perfected the use of Zyklon-B to gas their innocent captives by the 
hundreds every day.
  It was at Auschwitz that doomed prisoners, trapped inside the gas 
chambers with only a few choking minutes left to live, found the 
strength to scratch into the walls the words: Never forget.
  This week, on January 27, the world will commemorate the 60th 
anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and the 1.5 million victims, 
most of them Jewish, who perished in the death machine's fires.
  Vice President Dick Cheney is leading an American delegation to stand 
alongside the 2,000 survivors, as well as surviving Red Army soldiers. 
He will be joined by Lynne, his wife, numerous world leaders, and by 
the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Elie Wiesel.
  It will be a time for reflection, a time for remembrance but also for 
determination--determination that mankind will never again stand by as 
innocents perish in the monstrous designs of tyrants and despots.
  It will be a time to recommit ourselves to the battle against 
intolerance, against fanaticism and hatred, all of which can so easily 
poison the hearts of the most seemingly civilized men and women.
  As Kofi Annan declared yesterday during the United Nations General 
Assembly first ever recognition of the Holocaust:

       The evil that destroyed 6 million Jews and others in those 
     camps is one that still threatens all of us today.


[[Page 595]]


  Indeed, if you think of areas around the world, you think of the 
Darfur region today in western Sudan. To the innocents who perished, to 
those who survived and to the victims of genocide who now cry out, 
America's leaders hear your plea. We will never forget, and we will not 
stand by.
  Auschwitz taught us that the war against tyranny is more than a war 
of territory, more than a war of geographic boundaries. It is a war 
against evil itself. As Justice Robert Jackson solemnly inveighed to 
the world at the start of the Nuremberg trials:

       The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so 
     calculated, so malignant, so devastating that civilization 
     cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot 
     survive their being repeated.

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