
Walking again on the soil of Auschwitz mixed with the ashes of millions killed there, a human rights defender from India shares his dread at the capacity of human beings – “ordinary people like you and me” – for unspeakable cruelty towards ‘othered’ human beings, and his hope.
“It happened, so it can happen again…,” said chemist and writer Primo Levi after being released from the notorious Auschwitz concentration camp, where he had been incarcerated both for being a Jew and for fighting fascism in Italy.
He was unrecognisable after his ordeal, and for the remaining 40 years of his life, he battled the demons of his memories of the death camp.
As I walked through Auschwitz last year, 79 years after its liberation, there was an overcast sky, rain fell somberly, and cold winds blew. The words of Primo Levi haunted me as I stepped on soil in which the ashes of a million victims of hate were mixed,
A 2023 survey by the Washington, DC-based Pew Research Center found that 87% of the Indians interviewed preferred to be ruled by authoritarian or military rulers – more than in any other country surveyed.
The German people have bravely and painfully acknowledged the crimes of their history, sought to atone for these, and to remind succeeding generations of these horrors, so they may never recur.
“All other heads of state and government urge their people to look to the future with hope. But I believe my highest duty instead is to remind my people to never forget the past,” the German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier told me when we met in the fall of 2022.
And yet, in the 2024 elections to the EU, the far-right Alternative for Germany won the second-largest vote-share in Germany, and prevailed in all five former East German states. Winning 16.5% of the vote share, it surged past the Social Democratic Party of Chancellor Olof Scholz. With the coalition having fallen apart, another election is scheduled for 23 February. In neighbouring France, Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Party won 30% votes, around twice that of Macron’s Renew Party. Italian premier Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy doubled its seats.
Today, in Europe alone, far-right parties lead three more EU nations – Hungary, Slovakia and Italy – and are part of ruling coalitions in Sweden, Finland and the Netherlands. In many others, they are emerging as the principal opposition.
The United States recently saw Donald Trump, with his openly right-wing agenda, sworn in for the second time.
Every country in Southasia, except Nepal, has in its recent history grappled with the surge of religious extremism and societal and state targeting of religious minorities with prejudice, hate and violence, and the commanding lure of the political economy of the far-right.
I wished I could gently hold the hand of anyone, anywhere, who feels elevated by these politics and walk with them through the bleak grounds of Auschwitz. Let each of them at least be mindful of where the path that they have chosen can lead.
As Hitler rose to power in Germany, during the build-up to the Holocaust, leaders of the Hindutva Right in India spoke in glowing admiration of the ways that the Nazi leader dealt with the “Jewish problem”.

In 1938, following anti-Jewish legislation in Germany, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, a leading figure in the supremacist Hindu Mahasabha suggested a similar fate for India’s Muslims.”
The Holocaust was well underway in 1940 when Savarkar termed Nazism as “undeniably the saviour of Germany” and applauded the “wonderful” recovery of Germany or Italy “at the touch of Nazi or Fascist magical wand.”
“Germany’s crusade against the enemies of Aryan culture will bring all the Aryan nations of the world to their senses and awaken the Indian Hindus for the restoration of their lost glory,” he added [3].
Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar, the most influential ideologue of the RSS, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh that is the ideological lodestar of India’s ruling BJP, the Bharatiya Janata Party, also praised Nazism and advocated applying this ideology to India. Germany, he wrote, had shown that it is impossible for different races and cultures to be assimilated into a united whole, “a good lesson for us in Hindustan to learn and profit by”.
Echoing Hitler’s discourse and substituting Indian Muslims for European Jews, he held that “foreign elements” must either “merge themselves in the national race and adopt its culture” or “live at its mercy.”
This conviction is common for the entire spectrum of far-right parties. Bal Thackerey, supremo of the hard-right political party Shiv Sena declared in an interview to Time magazine in 1993, “There is nothing wrong if [Indian] Muslims are treated as Jews were in Nazi Germany.”
Just weeks before Mumbai saw its worst communal conflagration in 1992-93, he said, “If you take Mein Kampf and if you remove the word Jew and put in the word Muslim, that is what I believe in!”
Hitler’s autobiographical manifesto Mein Kampf is openly sold in India, even in bookstores in railway platforms, and remains a best-seller. There is considerable anecdotal evidence that growing numbers of young people choose Adolf Hitler as their role model over Mahatma Gandhi.
Reflections
I have visited Auschwitz before in several pilgrimages of grief and atonement. As I walked there last February, I was again overcome by dread and revulsion at the capacity of human beings – ordinary people like you and me – for unspeakable cruelty, and for inventiveness in fashioning novel grisly ways of brutality to ‘othered’ human beings.
Auschwitz was a complex of 40 concentration and extermination camps in German occupied Poland. Originally a camp for Polish political prisoners and forced labour that powered German industry during the Great War, it grew after 1939-40 into the largest hub of Nazi extermination.
I stood in the rain at the tiny railhead where more than a million people marked for annihilation or slave work arrived from 1942 to 1945. They were mostly Jewish women, men and children from German-occupied Europe, but also included prisoners of war, dissident intellectuals and political workers, Roma and Sinti people, Catholic priests and homosexuals. They alighted at the station after harrowing journeys over nights and days, packed in dark, airless compartments of freight trains, sometimes without even a place to lie down and with no separate places to defecate. Many died along the way.
They had been told they were going to be resettled in a new land with their families. For this they had been allowed to carry a suitcase with 50 kg of their most valued belongings. Instead, as they were marched from the railhead, doctors made a cursory selection of people capable of labour, just by looking at them as they walked, deciding a minute or less, who would live and slave and who would die.
The group considered unfit for labour included children, older and disabled people, pregnant women, women with small children and people with visible ailments including boils and cuts.
The unsuspecting groups were marched off in different directions. The group deemed unfit for labour was told that they would be disinfected and showered. Their suitcases were taken away, they were told to strip naked, and led into the shower room – a nearly airless room into which some 2,000 people were packed. Those who resisted were shot dead.
Once the room was packed to a point where no one could move, the guards slammed the doors shut and threw Blue Zyclon B crystals into the room, releasing lethal hydrogen cyanide. Children, women and men lashed and struggled. Screams escaped the gas chamber. Then silence. In 15 to 20 minutes, they were all dead.
Selected residents of the camps and guards, all wearing gas masks, pulled out the corpses to make room for the next batch of 2,000, an unending macabre loop of mass slaughter. The corpses were stripped of anything precious, like gold teeth and jewellery. Their heads were shaved and the hair sold to industry including to weave rugs. The suitcases, packed with photographs, cash, jewellery and clothes, that families had brought expecting to begin a new life were sorted Some were looted by the guards and officers, some collected to contribute to the war and extermination efforts of the Reich, some destroyed.
The corpses were burnt in massive ovens. The crematoria in the Auschwitz Birkenau extermination camp – the largest in the Auschwitz complex – developed the capacity to burn to ashes 2,000 bodies each day. Even this became too little, too slow, so large open incineration pits were deployed, with the capacity to burn up to 20,000 bodies a day. The ashes from the human bodies were later used as fertiliser, or strewn into the forests and rivers.
The Nazi genocide of European Jews is widely called the Holocaust – a word derived from the Greek holokauston, meaning a burnt sacrifice offered to God. In Israel, many prefer to call it the Shoʾah, a biblical Hebrew word meaning “catastrophe.”
Dehumanized
Oblivious about any of this, the group chosen for slave labour – mainly to work for big corporations like chemical giant IG Farben, weapons and steel manufacturer Krupps and electrical equipment manufacturer Siemens – were led to barracks after being shaved, deloused, and given prison uniforms. A number was tattooed on their arms. From then on, they were no longer humans with a past, only numbers.
Each barrack was just 35 by 11 metres. Into this were packed first 550, then over 700 prisoners. They slept on bunk beds, three of four prisoners to a bed. Each inmate was allotted just one square metre space in which to fit his body and his belongings. On one side were lines of dry open commodes, which each prisoner was given barely one minute in the day to use.
Food was watery soup, coffee substitute and 300 grams of bread a day. Inmates soon looked like skeletons. Cheerful orchestra music accompanied their daily march to worksites sometimes hours distant, for an 11-hour workday. Wearing thin, striped prison uniforms in winter sub-zero temperatures, most died of cold, hunger, disease, or exhaustion. Those who survived became walking skeletons. The average life of a prisoner in the concentration camps was just two months.
For prisoners deemed unruly or rebellious, punishments were drastic and merciless. Memoirs record that actions that were penalised included returning for a second serving of food, removing one’s gold teeth to clandestinely buy bread, breaking into a pigsty to steal the pigs’ food, putting one’s hands into one’s pockets, helping a prisoner who had been beaten, and picking up a cigarette butt.
There were no trials: the guards alone decided who deserved punishment and they executed the penalties. Some were flogged. Some were forced to put their heads into stoves, burning their faces and eyebrows. Some were locked in windowless underground cells with space enough just for four men to stand packed standing against each other. And here they were locked for sometimes three weeks. Standing for all the days of their confinement, they slept, defecated, urinated, sometimes became unconscious, and died.
Executions included publicly hanging or being shot in the back of the heads, as the amassed prisoners watched. Another punishment was simply starvation. Lock them in a cell and give them no food and water, until life painfully ebbed.
There were only 144 successful escapes from the death camps of Auschwitz. If any prisoner did manage to escape, a number of other prisoners were chosen at random, locked in a cell and starved to death as retribution.
The air the concentration camp prisoners breathed and the skies overhead were always thick with smoke from burning human bodies. New residents to the camp would ask about their children, wives, parents, and when they would be united with them? The veterans would point to the sky. Look up. In the smoke is your child, your wife, your mother. This is all that you will ever see of them. Until you, too, are united with them.
The film The Zone of Interest which won an Academy Award for the best International film in 2024 recreates the life of Rudolf Hoss, the first Commandant of Auschwitz. The only thing separating his spacious two-storey stucco home from the Auschwitz concentration camp where and his successors oversaw the killing of a million people, was a wall at the edge of the garden.
A few hundred metres from the house adjacent to the camp, we saw the place where the Allies hanged Hoss in 1947 as retribution for his crimes. He displayed no remorse. He was given a job to do by the Reich, he said, and he performed it the best he could.
We learnt that his younger son, then 92, had visited Auschwitz a couple of years earlier. When asked about his father, he said nothing for a while. Then, his body shaking with emotion, he only said, “He was a wonderful father”.
Confronting history
Today, I see around me our world in great turmoil. More and more people in country after country are choosing strongman authoritarian leaders who stoke hate and hostility against minorities and immigrants, persecute dissenters, are impatient with democratic processes and institutions and have close ties with big business.
Unimaginable levels of wealth are concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, while millions endure desperate hunger, dead-end insecure jobs at dirt wages, homelessness and disease. It has also become more dangerous to be a minority of any kind – people are persecuted for the colour of their skin, for who they worship, their caste, their gender, their language.
When the history of these times is written, this will be recorded as one of the cruellest periods of human history. There was of course much greater destitution, famine, epidemics in the past. But today the world has the resources many times over to ensure that no child sleeps hungry, no child dies because they cannot afford health care. We have the capacity to end all of this, but we choose not to.
But this is also a time of great resistance.
Noam Chomsky described the core of a good society luminously – it is a place where we take care of each other.
The way ahead, I believe, lies in claiming what is the soul of any democracy, and this is fraternity. The Hindi word for fraternity in the Indian constitution is beautiful – bandhuta. This means that whatever the differences in our faith and identity, we are bound to and with each other.
If there are chains on your feet, I feel my freedom is stolen from me. If there is pain in your heart, tears well up in my eyes.
If our broken world is to be repaired, we need to each join the battle for a world that is kind, equal and just. May we be driven by what I call radical love – love based on such fierce courage and conviction that for my love and care for you, I should be willing, if called upon, to go to prison, or even give my life.
Auschwitz happened because the large majority of the German people of that time championed and cheered the idea of Auschwitz, the idea that one set of people have the right to deem another as enemies so dangerous that their oppression, their expulsion and if possible, even their extermination is the path to one’s salvation. It is this that created a universe in which morality was annihilated.
I returned from Auschwitz with the renewed resolve that my people – all people – should never walk that path again. We must firmly block – with our bodies and our souls and the ways that we lead our lives – the pathways of accumulative radicalisation that led to Auschwitz. We must never allow our people, or any people, to be convinced that another community of people – usually weaker, smaller in numbers, vulnerable, more defenceless – are dangerous to public order, that these ‘other communities’ are threats to our survival, or that they are not even human, termites, snakes, cockroaches, rats, unfit to live.
But I did not return from Auschwitz bereft of hope. I heard the story of a Franciscan monk, Maximilian Kolbe, confined to one of the barracks in Auschwitz.
A prisoner had escaped from his barrack. The guards selected ten prisoners randomly for death by starvation as retribution. One prisoner selected for this punishment cried out – What will happen to my wife? To my children?
The monk Maximilian Kolbe quietly stepped forward. He volunteered to replace the prisoner who the guards had identified to die.
For two weeks, the ten prisoners were denied food and water in their underground bunker. One by one they died.
The four who still survived, including the monk, were then killed with injections of carbolic acid. An eyewitness later spoke of how Kolbe quietly raised his arm for the injection when his turn came.
He was entirely calm as he went to his death.
Primo Levi was tragically prescient when he predicted, “It happened, so it can happen again”. In the decades since Auschwitz, genocides have been unleashed against defenceless minorities around the world. In Rwanda, in Bosnia, in Sudan, in Myanmar and now in Gaza. And yet, as the example of the monk Maximilian Kolbe in the netherworld of Auschwitz affirms, human courage and human kindness survive the darkest times. It is these which will in the end prevail.
Harsh Mander, writer, peace and rights worker, researcher and teacher, leads the campaign Karwan e Mohabbat for justice and solidarity with survivors of hate violence. He has authored several books including Fatal Accidents of Birth: Stories of Suffering, Oppression and Resistance (Speaking Tiger Books, 2016). This is an updated and edited version of the article originally published by Scroll Media, March 2024.
Lead image: Prisoners arriving at Auschwitz via trains wearing the yellow star of David-the Jewish badge. Collage by Regina Johnson.