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"I wanted to ask my German acquaintance how he felt. But thinking that raising such an unpleasant reminder might put him on the spot, I couldn't bring myself to do it. And what's more, I know him to be such a gentle and decent person. . . ."
Author Junichi Watanabe, a former winner of the prestigious Naoki Prize, was giving Shukan Shincho (9/1) his impressions of "The Road to Mass Murder," the first installment of the joint British-American TV production "Auschwitz -- the Nazis and the Final Solution," aired by NHK TV on four consecutive nights in August.
In scene after scene, the documentary pieced together a chronology of the events that led to the murder of an estimated 6 million Jews, as well as millions of Poles, Roma (Gypsies), homosexuals and other groups at concentration camps, of which Auschwitz-Birkenau was the largest.
The NHK program rekindled old memories for Watanabe; shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, he had toured the site of the Sachenhausen concentration camp while visiting the former East Germany. "Seeing the ruins of this place overgrown with grass, where hundreds of thousands had perished, the breezes seemed to summon up the spiteful cries of those who died here, evoking a sense of horror," he recalls.
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