Lately it seems I'm getting a lot of cell phone messages from strange places.  Aside form the political calls I've gotten, I had one the other day from a survey place.  I yelled at the gal and demanded to know where she got my cell phone number from.  She quickly apologized and said she would take my number off the call list.  Yesterday I got one on voice mail from my bank about an ATT payment I had made on line.  I have to wait until Monday to see if that one was legit.  I've never had the bank call on that number before.

What's going on with the cell phone thing?  It's never been an issue until now.  Anyone else having the telemarketing/spam problem?

EPITAPH FOR THE BUSH DOCTRINE

By Jeff Jacoby

The Boston Globe

Wednesday, May 28, 2008

http://www.boston.com/bosto...

     Remember George W. Bush? He was the president who warned in 2002 that Iran and North Korea were part of an "axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world." On his watch, he vowed, the United States would "not permit the world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons."

     Bush was the leader who pledged at his second inauguration to support "democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world." He let it be known that the truculence of rogues and dictators would not be indulged. "Some," he said pointedly, "have unwisely chosen to test America's resolve -- and have found it firm."

     Whatever became of him? That president who in the wake of Sept. 11 posed a stark choice to the sponsors of jihadist violence -- "You are either with us, or you are with the terrorists" -- where is he now? And, more important, where is the foreign policy he once stood for?

     For some time now it has been apparent that the Bush Doctrine -- with the signal exception of Iraq -- didn't survive the Bush presidency. Notwithstanding the president's heartfelt words about supporting democratic reformers, for example, dissidents and freedom-seekers have largely been forgotten.

     "When you stand for your liberty," Bush told the world's prisoners of conscience in 2005, "we will stand with you." Yet while the brave democrat Ayman Nour rots in an Egyptian jail, Washington continues to send $1.8 billion in aid each year to the brutal regime of Hosni Mubarak. The administration restored full diplomatic relations with Moammar Khadafy's Libya, stopped designating it a sponsor of terror, and even invited the Libyan foreign minister to the White House. But it has forsaken Fathi el-Jahmi, Libya's foremost democratic dissident, who has spent years in Khadafy's dungeons for daring to advocate pluralism and free speech.

     So it has gone, in one country after another. In Russia, in Saudi Arabia, in China, the Bush administration's commitment to liberty and democratic reform has subsided into little more than lip service. The principled "freedom agenda" Bush championed so ardently has evaporated. In its place is the old "realist" agenda he had sworn to overhaul: stability, business-as-usual, stand-by-your-(strong)man.

     And what about those dangerous regimes that were seeking the world's most destructive weapons?

   In a dispiriting Weekly Standard cover story on Condoleezza Rice's record as secretary of state, Stephen Hayes notes that six years after Bush vowed to keep Iran and North Korea from going nuclear, "North Korea is a nuclear power and Iran is either on the brink . . . or making substantial progress." Despite a "seemingly endless series of  multilateral negotiations" aimed at neutralizing the two dictatorships, Pyongyang and  Tehran have grown more, not less, provocative. "And in each case," Hayes writes, "the State Department has gone out of its way to avoid dealing with these provocations lest they jeopardize our diplomacy."

     The Bush Doctrine was clear: Any regime aiding terrorists or other enemies of the United States would pay a severe price. Yet when North Korea was caught providing nuclear technology to Syria, the State Department wanted the news kept secret -- for fear, writes Hayes, that public disclosure of North Korea's proliferation might ruin negotiations. When he asked Rice what price Iran has paid for arming and training the Iraqi insurgents who kill US troops, she replied vaguely that "there are lots of consequences" but mentioned only the capture of an Iranian paramilitary commander in Irbil 18 months ago. "Well," she said, when pressed on whether she would negotiate with Iran even as it foments terrorism, "we've said we would talk about everything, all right."

     Back in 2000, Rice faulted the Clinton administration for being so obsessed with the trees of diplomacy that it repeatedly missed the forest of US national interest. "Multilateral agreements and institutions should not be ends in themselves," she wrote in an essay for Foreign Affairs. Now, alas, she presides over an all-too-Clintonian foreign policy, one in which negotiations and agreements and deal-making outweigh actual improvement and change. From North Korea to the Palestinian Authority to the United Nations, the principles of the Bush Doctrine have been forgotten. "We have gone," one State Department official sadly tells Hayes, "from a policy of preemption to a policy of preemptive capitulation." Is that to be the epitaph of Bush's foreign policy?

(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.)

(Note: The column below originally appeared on Memorial Day weekend in 2005.)

DEATH OF A MARINE

By Jeff Jacoby

The Boston Globe

Sunday, May 29, 2005

http://www.boston.com/news/...

    Monday night, in a special Memorial Day broadcast of ''Nightline," Ted Koppel will call the roll of the more than 900 US troops who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan during the past 12 months.  As each name is read, viewers will see a photograph of the fallen soldier.  Executive producer Tom Bettag says the program is meant to remind Americans, ''regardless of their feelings about the war, that the men and women who have given their lives in our behalf are individuals with names and faces." When ABC aired a similar "Nightline" in April 2004, it was accused in some quarters of trying to inflame antiwar sentiment for political purposes. In the event, it proved a solemn and respectful tribute, and there has been no controversy this year.

    Long lists of soldiers killed in wartime can have great emotional power, as anyone who has been to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington can attest.  However dignified and moving, though, in the end such a listing can really describe them only as a group: *They wore the uniform and died in the service of their country.*  But who they were individually, how they served, what they left behind -- that is more than a catalogue of names can convey.

    So here is the story behind just one of the names ''Nightline" will enumerate on Memorial Day: Sergeant Rafael Peralta of Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 3d Marines.  He was killed in action on Nov. 15 during Operation Dawn, the epic battle to retake the Sunni stronghold of Fallujah.

American hero: Marines Sgt. Rafael Peralta 

    What follows is chiefly based on an account by Marine Lance Corporal T.J. Kaemmerer, a combat correspondent who took part in the operation that cost Peralta his life.  Reports also appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The Marine Corps Times, The San Diego Union Tribune, and on ABC News.

    On the day he died, Rafael Peralta was 25 years old, a Mexican immigrant from San Diego who had enlisted in the Marines as soon as he became a legal resident.  He earned his citizenship while on active duty and re-upped in 2004.  He was a Marine to the core, so meticulous that when Alpha Company was training in Kuwait, he would send his camouflage uniform out to be pressed.

    He was no less passionate about his adopted country: His bedroom wall was adorned with a picture of his boot camp graduation and replicas of the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights.  ''Be proud of being an American," he wrote to his kid brother Ricardo, 14.  ''Our father came to this country and became a citizen because it was the right place for our family to be."  It was the first letter he ever wrote to Ricardo -- and the last.  It arrived in San Diego the day after he died.

    The Marines of the 1/3 were on the front lines in Fallujah, purging the city of terrorists in house-to-house combat.  As a platoon scout, Peralta could have stayed back in relative safety.  Instead, as was often the case, he volunteered to join the assault team.

    On the morning of Nov. 15, one week into the battle for Fallujah, his squad had cleared three houses without incident.  They approached a fourth, kicking in two locked doors simultaneously and entering both front rooms.  They found them empty.  Another closed door led to an adjoining room.  As the other Marines spread out, wrote Kaemmerer, ''Peralta, rifle in hand, tested the handle."  It wasn't locked.  He threw open the door, preparing to rush in -- and three terrorists with AK-47s opened fire.  He was shot multiple times in the chest and face.  As he fell, severely wounded, he managed to wrench himself out of the doorway to give his fellow Marines a clear line of fire.

    The gunfire was deafening.  To the sound of the terrorists' AK-47s was added the din of the Marines' M16 rifles and Squad Automatic Weapon, a machine gun.  The battle was raging, with Peralta down and bleeding heavily and the other Marines firing at the enemy in the back room, when, in Kaemmerer's words, ''a yellow, foreign-made, oval-shaped grenade bounced into the room, rolling to a stop close to Peralta's nearly lifeless body."

    As the other Marines tried to flee, Peralta reached for the grenade and tucked it into his gut.  Seconds later, it exploded with such force that when his remains were returned to his family for burial, they were able to identify him only by the tattoo on his shoulder.  His five comrades-in-arms, shielded from the worst of the blast by Peralta's last act as a Marine, survived.

**     **     **     **

    ''Right now, people are really nice and everything," Peralta's 12-year-old sister Karen told a reporter 10 days after her brother's death.  ''But I know that when it comes to later on, they are going to forget him.  They're going to forget about him."

    No, Karen.  The Marines, always faithful, do not forget their heroes.  And neither does the grateful nation that pauses to honor them this week -- the nation Rafael Peralta loved so deeply, and for which he gave his last full measure of devotion.

(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.)

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Jeff Jacoby welcomes comments and reads all his mail. Unfortunately, he receives so many letters that he cannot answer each one personally.

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Are you flying your flag today in honor of all those who have served and fallen defending our country?

History of Memorial Day courtesy of wiki.

Following the end of the Civil War, many communities set aside a day to mark the end of the war or as a memorial to those who had died. Some of the places creating an early memorial day include Charleston, South Carolina; Boalsburg, Pennsylvania; Richmond, Virginia; Carbondale, Illinois; Columbus, Mississippi; many communities in Vermont; and some two dozen other cities and towns. These observances eventually coalesced around Decoration Day, honoring the Union dead, and the several Confederate Memorial Days.

According to Professor David Blight of the Yale University History Department, the first memorial day was observed in 1865 by liberated slaves at the historic race track in Charleston. The site was a former Confederate prison camp as well as a mass grave for Union soldiers who had died while captive. The freed slaves reinterred the dead Union soldiers from the mass grave to individual graves, fenced in the graveyard & built an entry arch declaring it a Union graveyard; a very daring thing to do in the South shortly after North's victory. On May 30 1868 the freed slaves returned to the graveyard with flowers they'd picked from the countryside & decorated the individual gravesites, thereby creating the 1st Decoration Day. A parade with thousands of freed blacks and Union soldiers was followed by patriotic singing and a picnic.

The official birthplace of Memorial Day is Boalsburg, Pennsylvania. The village was credited with being the birthplace because it observed the day on May 5, 1866, and each year thereafter, and because it is likely that the friendship of General John Murray, a distinguished citizen of Waterloo, and General John A. Logan, who led the call for the day to be observed each year and helped spread the event nationwide, was a key factor in its growth.

General Logan had been impressed by the way the South honored their dead with a special day and decided the Union needed a similar day. Reportedly, Logan said that it was most fitting; that the ancients, especially the Greeks, had honored their dead, particularly their heroes, by chaplets of laurel and flowers, and that he intended to issue an order designating a day for decorating the grave of every soldier in the land, and if he could he would have made it a holiday.

Logan had been the principal speaker in a citywide memorial observation on April 29, 1866, at a cemetery in Carbondale, Illinois, an event that likely gave him the idea to make it a national holiday. On May 5, 1868, in his capacity as commander-in-chief of the Grand Army of the Republic, a veterans' organization, Logan issued a proclamation that "Decoration Day" be observed nationwide. It was observed for the first time on May 30 of the same year; the date was chosen because it was not the anniversary of a battle. The tombs of fallen Union soldiers were decorated in remembrance of this day.

Many of the states of the U.S. South refused to celebrate Decoration Day, due to lingering hostility towards the Union Army and also because there were very few veterans of the Union Army who lived in the South. A notable exception was Columbus, Mississippi, which on April 25, 1866 at its Decoration Day commemorated both the Union and Confederate casualties buried in its cemetery.[1]

Troops at the Washington, D.C. Memorial Day parade, 1942.

The alternative name of "Memorial Day" was first used in 1882, but did not become more common until after World War II, and was not declared the official name by Federal law until 1967 . On June 28, 1968, the United States Congress passed the Uniform Holidays Bill, which moved three holidays from their traditional dates to a specified Monday in order to create a convenient three-day weekend and for the first time recognized Columbus Day as a federal holiday. The holidays included Washington's Birthday (which evolved into Presidents' Day), Veterans Day, and Memorial Day. The change moved Memorial Day from its traditional May 30 date to the last Monday in May. The law took effect at the federal level in 1971 . After some initial confusion and unwillingness to comply at the state level, all fifty states adopted the measure within a few years, although Veterans Day was eventually changed back to its traditional date. Ironically, most corporate businesses no longer close on Columbus Day or Veterans Day, and an increasing number are staying open on President's Day as well. Memorial Day, however, has endured as one holiday during which most businesses stay closed because it marks the beginning of the "summer vacation season," as does neighboring Canada's Victoria Day, which occurs just before, on the third Monday in May.

MISUNDERSTANDING MARRIAGE IN CALIFORNIA

By Jeff Jacoby

The Boston Globe

Wednesday, May 21, 2008

http://www.boston.com/bosto...

     California’s voters, unlike their counterparts in Massachusetts, will have the last word on what marriage means in their state. When the highest court in Massachusetts conjured up a constitutional right to same-sex marriage five years ago, 170,000 Bay State voters petitioned for an amendment to the state constitution that would restore the age-old definition. Their effort died on the vine when the Legislature derailed the measure before it could reach the ballot.

     But citizen initiatives aren't so easily thwarted in California, where last week the state supreme court, in a 4-3 ruling, likewise overturned the timeless understanding of marriage as a union of male and female. Some 1.1 million signatures have already been submitted on behalf of a constitutional amendment making clear that "only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California." That is far more than needed, making it virtually certain that Californians will have an opportunity to override the court's presumptuous diktat.

     And override it they should, for numerous reasons. Here are three:

    1. It is not the business of judges to make public policy.

     Reasonable men and women can disagree on whether same-sex unions should be granted legal recognition, or whether such recognition should rise to the level of marriage. The place to work out those disagreements is the democratic arena, not the courtroom.

     "From the beginning of California statehood," the court's majority opinion admits, "the legal institution of civil marriage has been understood to refer to a relationship between a man and a woman." Eight years ago, Californians decisively affirmed that understanding when they adopted Proposition 22, the California Defense of Marriage Act, in a 61-39 landslide. To have legitimacy, any change in that consensus must come from the people or their elected representatives, not be forced upon them by an imperial judiciary. When judges impose their social theories without such legitimacy, the result can be years of anger and strife. California and the nation do not need another Roe v. Wade.

    2. The radical transformation of marriage won't end with same-sex weddings.

     In American law, certain conditions of marriage have always been nonnegotiable. A marriage joins (a) two people (b) of the opposite sex (c) who are not close relatives. Under that venerable definition, there can be no valid same-sex marriage, no polygamous or other plural marriage, and no incestuous marriage. But if the opposite-sex requirement is an unconstitutional infringement on the right to marry -- which the California court explains as "the right of an individual to establish a legally recognized family with the person of one's choice" -- then so are the restriction of marriage to two people and the ban on incestuous marriage. If two women who wish to marry each other must be permitted to do so, why not two sisters? Why not three?

     In a footnote, the California court weakly tries to evade the consequences of its holding. Gay and lesbian couples are entitled to marry, writes Chief Justice Ronald George, but that "does not mean that this constitutional right . . . must . . . extend to polygamous or incestuous relationships." Why not? Well, because "our nation's culture has considered the latter types of relationships inimical to the mutually supportive and healthy family relationships promoted by the constitutional right to marry." So while the bar to homosexual marriage must be overturned because the court considers the public's opposition to it outdated, the public's opposition to incest and polygamy is still a good reason to bar *them.* As one of the dissenters notes, such logic invites a future court to overturn those prohibitions as well.

    3. Society has a vested interest in promoting only traditional marriage.

     Men and women are not interchangeable, and same-sex unions -- no matter how devoted and enduring -- cannot take the place of a married husband and wife. The essential function of marriage is to unite male and female. That is the only kind of union that can produce new life, and therefore the only kind of union in which society has a survival stake.

     Of course many gay and lesbian relationships are stable, loving, and happy. But since they cannot do what marriage can -- bind men and women to each other and to the children that their sexual behavior may produce -- they have never been regarded in the same light as marriage. That crucial distinction somehow eluded a majority of the California Supreme Court. Happily, California voters will soon have the chance to make things right.

(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.)

THE OTHER OBAMA IS FAIR GAME, TOO

By Jeff Jacoby

The Boston Globe

Sunday, May 25, 2008

http://www.boston.com/bosto...

     On the website of the Tennessee Republican Party is a short video in which residents of Nashville talk about the pride they feel for their country. One man, for example, mentions his esteem for the First and Second Amendments. A Vanderbilt graduate student says he was proud when Ronald Reagan told Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall -- "and I was prouder when it came down." A young professional woman extols the "academic and job opportunities that women have in this country." A police officer named Juan says he is proud of having immigrated to the United States, learned English, and become a citizen of this "land of opportunity and the best country in the world."

     The video has a point to make, and it does so by alternating these upbeat comments with clips of Michelle Obama telling two different audiences in February: "For the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country." In an understated press release announcing the video, the state GOP welcomed Mrs. Obama to Nashville and remarked: "The Tennessee Republican Party has always been proud of America."

     One would have to have skin of microscopic thinness to take offense at so gentle and indirect a critique. No surprise, then, that Barack Obama took offense, reacting as if his bride had been slimed by slurs akin to those that enraged Andrew Jackson when *he* ran for president. (During the campaign of 1828, supporters of John Quincy

Adams maligned Jackson's mother as a "common prostitute" and mocked his adored wife, Rachel, as a "convicted adulteress" and a "strumpet.") In an interview on ABC, Obama growled that Republicans "should lay off my wife," and described the inoffensive Tennessee video as "detestable," "low class," and reflecting "a lack of decency."

     If Republicans "think that they're going to try to make Michelle an issue in this campaign," he added ominously, "they should be careful."

     Ooh, very fierce. But unless Obama is prepared to emulate Jackson -- Old Hickory defended his wife's honor by fighting duels, in one of which he killed a man -- he stands no chance of putting his wife's remarks off-limits to criticism. As long as he keeps sending her around the country to campaign on his behalf, everything she says is -- and should be -- fair game.

     And unfortunately for Obama and his allegedly sunny politics of hope, what Mrs. Obama seems to say with grim regularity is that America is a scary, bleak, and hopeless place.

     Here she is, for instance, in Wisconsin:

     "Life for regular folks has gotten worse over the course of my lifetime, through Republican and Democratic administrations. It hasn't gotten much better."

     And in South Carolina:

     America is "just downright mean" and "guided by fear . . . We have become a nation of struggling folks who are barely making it every day."

     And in North Carolina:

     "Folks are struggling like never before . . . When you're that busy struggling all the time, which most people that you know and I know are, you don't have time to get to know your neighbor . . . In fact, you feel very alone in your struggle, because you feel that somehow it must be your fault that you're struggling so hard . . . People are afraid, because when your world's not right, no matter how hard you work, then you become afraid of everyone and everything, because you don't know whose fault it is, why you can't get a handle on life, why you can't secure a better future for your kids . . . Fear is the worst enemy. It . . . creates this veil of impossibility, and it is hanging over all of our heads."

     There is also her creepily authoritarian vision of life under an Obama administration. From a speech in California:

     "Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zone . . . Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual -- uninvolved, uninformed."

      Michelle Obama is undeniably smart, driven, outspoken, and charismatic. She is also relentlessly negative about life in these United States. True, she is not the one running for president. But she is Barack Obama's closest confidante and adviser; if he is elected, her influence will be considerable. That is why her words matter. And why, whether her husband likes it or not, Michelle Obama is a legitimate issue in this campaign.

(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for the Boston Globe.)

MUSINGS, RANDOM AND OTHERWISE

By Jeff Jacoby

The Boston Globe

Sunday, May 18, 2008

http://www.boston.com/bosto...

     Speaking in Jerusalem on Thursday, President Bush criticized the appeasement-flavored mindset of those who imagine that the world's worst tyrants can be placated with face-to-face chats. "Some seem to believe we should negotiate with terrorists and radicals," said Bush, "as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along."

     Though Bush didn't mention anyone by name, Democrats decided that his target was Barack Obama. The Obama campaign blasted the president for launching an "unprecedented political attack on foreign soil" -- and insisted that if Obama is elected, "we're not going to sit down and engage Iran, unless or until they give up their nuclear weapons program."

     Really? Obama's own website describes him as "the only major candidate who supports tough, direct presidential diplomacy with Iran without preconditions." When Obama was asked during a televised debate last year whether he would agree "to meet separately, without precondition . . . with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea," he promptly answered: "I would."

     If Obama has had a change of heart, he should say so. (He should update his website, too.) Complaining of an "unprecedented political attack" when he hasn't even been named, let alone misrepresented, is peevish and pathetic, not presidential.

*  *  *  *  *

     In 2006, Chicago aldermen voted to prohibit city restaurants from serving foie gras. At the time, Mayor Richard Daley called it "the silliest law the City Council has ever passed." Last week the aldermen came around to Daley's view, and voted overwhelmingly to lift the ban.

     There are certainly good reasons to shun foie gras, which is produced by force-feeding ducks and geese through a tube jammed down their throats, making their livers bloat to 10 times the normal size. But in a free society, government attempts to proscribe popular consumer choices are usually improper and ineffective. If I disapprove of foie gras on humanitarian (or other) grounds, I should be making the case against it in the marketplace of ideas -- not lobbying Big Brother to forbid it.

     Prohibition doesn't annul demand, and demand generally finds its supply. Liquor didn't vanish under the Volstead Act; it moved underground, into speakeasies and other illegal channels. Foie gras didn't disappear either; Chicago diners have had little difficulty finding "duckeasies" where chefs continued to prepare it. Happily, chefs and diners can come out of the shadows now, and animal-welfare activists can do what they should have been doing all along: Using reason, not force, to achieve their goal.

*  *  *  *  *

     The Boston Globe recently reported that retirements are suddenly spiking at the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority. Why? Because a new law taking effect in 2009 slightly reduces benefits for workers who retire before age 65. The major change: As of next year, retirees will have to pay 15 percent of their health insurance premium. Current retirees get free healthcare for life. That's in addition to their pensions, of course. MBTA workers can retire with a full pension after just 23 years on the job, at which point they are perfectly free to find another government job and get right back on the public payroll.

     Such double-dipping is common in the public sector, as are so many other lucrative perks that government employees take for granted and most private employees can only dream about. "The nation is dividing into two classes of workers: those who have government benefits and those who don't," USA Today noted in 2007. "The gap is accelerating in every way -- pensions, medical benefits, retirement ages." According to the Congressional Research Service, the pension collected by the average private-sector retiree is worth less than half of what a typical government retiree can expect. If you don't have your snout in the government trough, you can expect to work ever-longer hours and pay ever-higher taxes and fees to support those who do.

     Those, to mention just a single example, like Michael Mulhern. He is the 40-something former MBTA general manager who "retired" in 2005, began collecting a $130,000 annual pension, then hired on as head of the MBTA retirement fund, a job that pays about $225,000 annually. Mulhern's total take: more than $350,000 a year. He is just one illustration of a huge problem growing more urgent by the day -- the staggering sums that taxpayers are shelling out for the care and feeding of avaricious public employees. In Massachusetts and nationwide, a backlash is coming.

(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.)

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Today at 3:30 PM we will have a new baby in our family.  My grandson and his wife will be having their first child C-Section at Mercy Southwest.  Of course, pictures will follow this occasion.  Of the baby, not the C-Section.

:-)

A FACTORY FOR DEATH

(Note: The column below originally appeared in 2005, on the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. I send it today on the occasion of Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day.)

The Boston Globe

         & nbsp;       &n bsp;       &nb sp;      

Thursday, January 27, 2005

http://www.boston.com/news/...

     By the time the Soviet Army reached Auschwitz on Jan. 27, 1945 -- 60 years ago this week -- my father was no longer there. Ten days earlier, the Nazis had evacuated about 67,000 of the death camp’s inmates, dispatching them on brutal forced marches to the west. My father, then 19, was in a group sent into Austria. He ended up at the concentration camp in Ebensee, near Mauthausen. Liberation there didn’t come until May 9, with the arrival of US soldiers from the 80th Infantry Division.

     My father had entered Auschwitz the previous spring, together with his parents, his two brothers, and two of his three sisters. They, too, were gone by the time the camp was liberated. Unlike my father, they didn’t leave on foot. They “left” through the chimney. For the overwhelming majority of the more than 1.1 million Jews who were sent to Auschwitz, there was no other exit.

     Jews were not the only victims. Nearly 75,000 Poles, more than 20,000 Gypsies, 15,000 Soviets, and 10,000 members of other nationalities were murdered at Auschwitz as well. The Nazis first used the camp, in fact, as a prison for Polish dissidents, and Birkenau, the huge 1941 addition that became the main Auschwitz killing center, was originally designed to hold Soviet POWs.

     But beginning in the spring of 1942, Auschwitz became first and foremost a slaughterhouse for Jews. From every corner of Europe, Jews were sent there – from France in the west to Ukraine in the east, from as far north as Norway and as far south as Greece. Many, like my father and two of his siblings, were forced into slave labor, in the expectation that the ghastly conditions and starvation rations would kill them soon enough. But most of the Jews entering Auschwitz – like my father’s parents and his youngest brother and sister – were murdered as soon as they arrived.

     Auschwitz was a vast factory of death, the site of the greatest mass murder in recorded history. Even now, two generations later, it is almost impossible to grasp the scale on which the Nazis committed homicide there. It is suggested by a detail: From 1942 to 1944, the train platform in Birkenau was the busiest railway station in Europe. It held that distinction despite the fact that, unlike every other train station in the world, it saw only arrivals. No passengers ever left.

     But Auschwitz was not only a place of murder. It was also a place of theft.

     Jews were robbed of everything they owned – the luggage they came with, the clothes on their backs, the hair on their heads, even the gold in their teeth. The stolen goods were stored in 35 warehouses, where they were sorted and packed for shipment to Germany. Before fleeing in January 1945, the Nazis burned 29 of the warehouses, but in just the six that remained, the Soviets found 348,820 men’s suits, 836,255 dresses, and 43,525 pairs of shoes. There were seven trainloads of bedding, waiting to be shipped. And 7.7 tons of human hair. And that was merely what remained at the very end. 

      The very worst thing about Auschwitz was -- what? The staggering death toll? The gas chambers disguised as showers, in which thousands of naked Jews went daily to agonizing deaths? The endless cruelty and torture? The diseases that ravaged those the Nazis didn’t kill first?

     Was it the inhuman medical experiments carried out by doctors like Josef Mengele, such as the deliberate destruction of healthy organs, or the sadistic abuse of twins and dwarfs? Was it the willing exploitation of Jewish slave labor by German corporations? The tens of thousands of murdered children and babies?

     No.

     The very worst thing about Auschwitz is that, for all its evil immensity, it was only a fraction of the total. Even if it had never been built, the Holocaust would still have been a crime without parallel in human history. It would still have been something so monstrous that a new word – genocide – would have had to be coined to encompass it. Never before and never since has a government made the murder of an entire people its central aim.  And never before or since has a government turned human slaughter into an international industry, complete with facilities for transportation, selection, murder, incineration. And none of it as a means to an end, but as an end in itself: The reason for wiping out the Jews was so that the Jews would be wiped out.

     In the end, 6 million of them were killed. But only one-sixth died at Auschwitz.

(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.)

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