6 | JANUARY 27 • 2022 

1942 - 2022

Covering and Connecting 
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PURELY COMMENTARY

essay

Caught in Ice, Light, Silence
J

anuary is the month 
that tries our souls, 
often bringing the year’s 
worst weather to Michigan. 
It turns post-holiday defla-
tion into a sense of lingering 
dread, a looming despair 
fueled by bitter 
winds, intermi-
nable lake effect 
snow and some 
of the calendar’s 
shortest days. 
Each January, 
the physical 
cold I feel is 
accompanied by the harsher 
and icier winds of history. 
Sometimes they buffet me as 
I walk across a frozen park-
ing lot on the Grand Valley 
State campus or crunch my 
way through drifting snow 
between buildings. More 
often they penetrate a warm 
classroom or the harbor of my 

office when I pause to remem-
ber the many thousands who 
once marched through the 
snows of Poland in 1945. 
For a host of reasons, Yom 
HaShoah, which usually falls 
in April, has become the day 
when most Jews mark the 
Holocaust, but I sometimes 
think that in our northern 
clime, Jan. 27, designated 
by the United Nations as 
International Holocaust 
Remembrance Day, may be 
the more appropriate com-
memorative choice, marking 
the moment in 1945 when 
troops of the Red Army liber-
ated Auschwitz-Birkenau. 
 Liberation, though, is a 
misnomer. Ten days before 
the Soviets arrived, the Nazis 
had evacuated nearly all the 
camp’s prisoners, some 56,000 
men and women, marching 
them west into the Polish 
winter. 

Elie Wiesel’s Night forever 
etched this infamous death 
march in our collective mem-
ories, though his account 
seldom lingers over the cold 
felt by the malnourished 
and rag-clad victims. Still, 
when teaching Night during a 
Michigan winter, I always try 
to make this section visceral 
to my students by asking them 
to imagine setting out, right 
then, without their North 
Face coats and Ugg boots, for 
a march through the snow 
to Big Rapids, some 73 miles 
away. With no food or water, 
with Germans shepherds 
tearing at their heels and with 
pistol shots for those who 
faltered. 

THE TORMENTS 
OF WINTER
For me, such a mental exer-
cise always evokes Dante’s 
Inferno, where the deepest 

center of Hell is a vast frozen 
lake, Cocytus, in which trai-
tors are embedded in the ice. 
Six hundred years later, what 
the poet could only imagine 
had been created by Hitler’s 
legions on the windswept 
Silesian plains. 
 Among the many survivor 
accounts of Auschwitz there 
are some common observa-
tions regarding the seasons: 
spring was a time of viscous 
mud that grabbed the pris-
oners’ wooden-soled clogs; 
summer was when the camp’s 
pestilential stench hung over 
them; but it was the Polish 
winter that most tormented 
them, its very approach strik-
ing fear in even the most vet-
eran of haftlinge or prisoners. 
Primo Levi, writing of the 
onset of winter in the chapter 
“October 1944” of Survival 
in Auschwitz, recalls thinking 
that it would kill seven out 

Robert 
Franciosi

continued on page 8

