writebrained, rightbrained

Auschwitz

When I was ten years old, I read about World War II somewhere and was inspired to do a project for our fifth grade Social Studies Fair on the Holocaust.  I remember building a cardboard model of a concentration camp, complete with string and tin foil barbed wire, and carefully lettering a poster listing how many people had died in each European country.  Yes, I can offer this as evidence of being a morbid little child!  But I found that despite knowing many of the facts nearly my whole life, it was still moving and disturbing to visit this place on Monday.

Nearly everything I could say has been written elsewhere.  So I’ll just describe my photos below, and mention the two or three things which really stayed with me during the day. 

Barbed wire

The execution wall, where several thousand prisoners were shot

The fence between the women’s area and men’s area in the main camp

The crematorium chimney.  “Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky.” - Elie Wiesel

The entrance gate, inscribed with “Arbeit macht frei,” or “work shall set you free.”  The deportees were told that Auschwitz was a work camp until they were inside, so they did not panic or try to escape.

The sign at the gate to Birkenau.

Birkenau, where 100k prisoners were housed at a time.  Sleeping quarters in a space originally designed to hold horses.

A railway car, the platform where prisoner “selection” occurred, in front of the main gate of Birkenau (the “gate to hell.”)

It was extremely difficult to describe the scale of the camp.  Auschwitz was capable of gassing and cremating 20,000 human beings in one day, and it is believed that it operated at capacity during the deportation of Hungary’s Jewish population in 1942 and again, very close to the end of the war.  More than one million people died at Auschwitz, and as has been described by many, the number itself is difficult for the human mind to grasp.  The barracks literally stretched as far as the eye could see.   We learned from our tour that the barracks housed one hundred thousand inmates at a time, and that the entire occupants were replaced every few months, so this gave the first tangible representation of the number of human beings that passed through here.  Of course, most of the victims were actually unnumbered and died going straight from the railway cars to the gas chambers after the sorting process; only those who were considered fit for heavy labor were spared for the barracks and confinement.

Our tour guide was an older, dignified local Polish woman whose uncles had been killed at Auschwitz because they were caught helping a Jewish prisoner who had escaped from the camp.  She was very emotional throughout the tour and provided much needed grounding point.  How do the descendants of the Holocaust legacy (or survivors, or witnesses, or visitors) come to terms with a place like this?  Much has been written…. I won’t pretend to write anything profound here.

I cried when I saw the ovens and when we saw the photos which had been taken of prisoners before they were killed, especially the children.  Each person had a shaved head and identical striped uniforms, but you could see so much in their eyes: humiliation, terror, loss, sadness, weariness, and near-panic, like that in the eyes of a young girl old enough to comprehend what was happening, but unable to stop any of it.  In the older prisoners, there is a terrible cynicism and resignation: death of the soul before the death of the physical body.  The rooms of shoes, personal items, and hair, are, I believe, replicated in the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC, but still affecting, especially a room full of suitcases, including suitcases marked with very young children’s names.

In Norway, every school child is required to make the journey to this camp to see the museum there.  This is good, but even in our time, things happen and the international community has not determined successful ways to mediate or protect individuals from atrocities occurring.  It was strange, almost disconcerting to leave the camp and see that the sun was still shining peacefully on the grass outside the entrance.  Many more distinguished people than myself have thought and written about this, and we obviously today still have wars, displaced peoples, refugee camps, and genocide…

The day was a reminder about the best and worst in people, and how the fault lines between us can so easily be exploited and end in destruction.  I could espouse my view that not just children, but every adult should be aware of these places, including the refugee camps in Darfur, Gaza, and outside Iraq.  Instead I’ll try to remember that these fault lines also exist also between individual humans, and perhaps that is a better starting point before questioning the myriad imperfect ways these fault lines are handled politically.