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Jacob Bronowski physically stepped into the pond, soaking his shoes and the bottoms of his suit trousers.
“It is said that science will dehumanize people and turn them into numbers,” the eloquent mathematician and philosopher said, staring into the camera, wiping a hand over his forehead. “That is false, tragically false.
“Look for yourself. This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance. It was done by dogma. It was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods.”
The images filled less than four minutes of Bronowski’s sweeping — and sweepingly insightful — television series “The Ascent of Man,” first aired in the U.S. in 1975. That’s roughly a scant 0.6% of the 13-part, 650-minute series. Yet if you saw Bronowski stand in the pond and deliver his soliloquy, odds are you remembered it for life.
We can never over-dramatize the truth about the Holocaust. It remains, despite decades, impossible to diminish.
We must never forget.
For a short but powerful time Tuesday, the humanity and lessons of this great tragedy filled the Friedman Jewish Community Center, as the heavily talented Arcadia Chorale performed the Holocaust Cantata, an hour of music and narration telling the stories of people — in their own words — who had been imprisoned in concentration camps.
A teen-age girl disguised as an old woman spirited to the attic of a countryside family she didn’t really know, only to turn herself in when the Nazis promised to kill her family if she didn’t come out of hiding.
Six babies born in the hospital at a concentration camp, their mothers singing lullabies in different languages with the hope that, since they were allowed to be born, they would be spared by the monsters in charge. The Nazis killed all six infants — and their mothers — with poison injections.
A young man about to be hanged kicking away the bucket that propped him up with the noose around his neck, defiantly opting to kill himself rather than be killed.
The JCC and the Chorale did a tremendous if emotionally challenging service in bringing the cantata to our area as part of a Yom HaShoah Day of Remembrance event.
The lessons of how cruelly humans can treat each other in the name of country or cause will remain relevant as long as people keep believing violence and war are acceptable means to an end. They are relevant right now because our country remains deeply embroiled in hyper-partisan tribalism, too many politicians and pundits preferring the language of certainty who are too willing to demonize and dehumanize anyone with an alternative viewpoint.
“I owe it as a scientist to my friend Leo Szilard, I owe it as a human being to the many members of my family who died at Auschwitz, to stand here by the pond as a survivor and a witness,” Bronowski said as he crouched down and ran a hand slowly through the water, raising a palm full of muck to the camera. “We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power. We have to close the distance between the push-button order and the human act.
“We have to touch people.”
— Times Leader