Hell And The Holocaust

I Hell: Definition and Description

Death camps. Zyclon B: cyanide-based pesticide. Use: Fitting to the nth degree for the purpose of destroying sub-humans having more in common with pestiferous insects than with the human race.

A vast, unbottom'd boundless pit,
Fill'd fou 'o lowing brunstane,
Wha's raging ragin' flame an' scorchin' heat,
Wad melt the hardest whunstane. R. Burns

Gathered from all the cesspools and pits of xenophobic, racist European society where they were sometimes quietly, sometimes violently despised, to assemble into holding areas called ghettoes, far from the original in Venice; these crowded, squalid pre-death camps suffocated the Jewish spirit rendering their victims compliant but not complacent, awaiting they knew not yet quite what.

There is in hell a place stone-built throughout,
Called Malebolge of an iron hue,
Like to the wall that circles it about.
(Loco e interno detto Malebolge,
Tutto di pietra e di color ferrigno,
Come la cerchia che d' intorno il volge.) Dante

In that world there were many helping hands, eager to divest their communities and their societies and their nations of the irritating inconvenience of those classical outsiders; biblical-era scapegoats transformed into the world's detested horde of balefully malicious skulkers intent on world domination.

Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscrib'd
In one self place; for where we are is hell;
And where hell is, there must we ever be;
And to conclude, when all the world dissolves,
And every creature shall be purified,
All places shall be hell that are not heaven. Christopher Marlowe

We pause but briefly to recall six million lives methodically, systematically extinguished because there were those who would have it so. The world made that much poorer for their absence. Loving life as they did, their cries for mercy and for help to avoid their fate went unanswered, their desperately clawing hands ignored, clasping life and loved ones as they made that journey from whence none return.

A dungeon horrible on all sides round
As one great furnace flam'd yet from those flames
No light, but rather darkness visible,
Serv'd only to discover sights of woe,
regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace
And rest can never dwell, hope never comes
That comes to all, but torture without end. Milton - Paradise Lost

Heaven and Hell, Hieronymus Bosch