A Day in Hell

     As some of you know, I went to Auschwitz Monday morning.  A few of you have asked for my impressions about it.  I’m happy to oblige you, because it really is an experience that’s got me thinking about a lot of things.  That said, I’m glad that I’ve had time to let it roll around in my head for a while before writing about it, because I didn’t have the experience there that I expected, and I wasn’t really sure what to say before.

     First, a bit of background: There are two camps near one another: Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II – Birkenau.  The first is set up more like a museum, and houses most of the famous sights and the disturbing exhibits.  It has the famous sign above the entrance, “arbeit macht frei,” (translation: work makes you free).  There are piles and piles of suitcases, eyeglasses, shoes, a wall of photos, and even a room full of human hair (we weren’t allowed to photograph the hair, but let me assure you that the sheer quantity is enough to make even someone with guts of steel feel queasy).  There is one gas chamber, a “death wall” for executions by shooting, a crematorium, and the building where medical experiments were carried out.  It is pretty small.  Birkenau has largely been left alone, except that most of the wooden barracks on the men’s side were falling down, so they used timber from the broken ones to re-create several examples, and left only the chimneys up from the others.  There is also a memorial in between two of the gas chambers, which are left in ruins, as they were destroyed by the Nazis near the end of the war.  It is enormous.  As far as you can see, there are rows and rows of barracks (built by the prisoners themselves, and each housing hundreds of prisoners).

     The museum was pretty hard to see, but it could have been worse.  Whoever set it up meant for the buildings and objects to speak for themselves, and therefore did not include images of many of the more heart-wrenching, gut-turning things that I have seen in books and movies.  But for me, somehow, Birkenau was harder to see.  It was just buildings and fields, and a railroad platform running down the middle.  But when I thought about the sheer number of people who’d been trapped in there, starving, squeezing together to eat, sleep, shit, and die, when I thought about the fact that some 75% of people who arrived were killed before they ever saw those crowded barracks, and that it was the prisoners (and not the soldiers) who had to clean up and cremate all the dead bodies, including their neighbors and family, sometimes…that was the part that felt most real.  That was when I felt the goose bumps you feel when you’re standing in a place where something momentous has happened.  I was walking the long path to the gas chambers, and I knew it was the same path that so many took to their deaths, and it occurred to me how lucky I’ve been, and how self-indulgent.  How no matter what is in my past, no matter what sad things may be in my future, I have never seen that kind of senseless evil.  I have never met anyone who could kill thousands and thousands of people with the twitch of his thumb in the wrong direction.  It wasn’t just Hitler.  Everybody talks about Hitler, and how he set the whole thing in motion, but there is no way that all of this evil was even planned by just one man.  It was planned by many, and carried out by thousands.  Did you know that a lot of Jewish people actually bought tickets on those horrid cargo trains?  They were told that they were going to be resettled in a better place, and they were sold tickets to their own torture and executions.  I don’t know how I didn’t know that, but I didn’t.  And we separate ourselves from it so easily, blame it on one nutcase, but it wasn’t one man, it could happen again, and most of us don’t show proper respect for those facts, as far as I’m concerned.

     Some of the people I was on the tour with told me that they were “disappointed,” because they’d expected something more.  I didn’t exactly feel that way myself, but I knew what they meant.  I’d actually been worried that the experience might prove to be a little bit too much for me.  It’s been two days now, and I think I’ve figured out why we didn’t get what we expected.  We’ve been inundated with movies, stories, books, photos of the violence, torture and suffering that took place in those camps.  Somewhere in our minds, we filed it all away with all of the other stories we’d been told in our lives.  An awful one, but another story.  My generation has never seen cruelty on that scale, thank God.  The closest we’ve probably come is 9-11, or Abu Graib.  Both awful, but not like the Holocaust.  And even though we know it’s true, we can’t really imagine it.  The camp doesn’t have blood stains on the walls, the grass has continued to grow, the sun still shines there, butterflies swoop around.  The kind of suffering that happened there just doesn’t, and probably can’t feel real to anyone as privileged as we have been.  I’m grateful for that.  And incredibly humbled.

    

If you want to see the rest of my photos, they're here.

Thanks for reading.