We’re 15 days into a whole new year! I hope the coming year brings to all good health, success in endeavors, the ability to stay strong in the face of adversity, the drive to fight injustice where you see it, the desire to improve our homes and communities, and the hope of a better year, with less sorrow and chaos and conflict, and much more humanity. I have hope for 2008…and with my loved ones I hope to make this year a happier one, one that brings us all together, one that creates beautiful memories and one that holds even greater hope for the future.
So I basically disappeared after my last post. We left for Krakow and Oswiecim soon after (Dec 28th) and then I left for England, where I essentially spent all my time adoring my niece, except for the final two days in London. And since returning I’ve been quite literally caught up in stuff, and just not in a writing mood. I apologize to anyone who’s been following up on my Poland trip. Blogging has to be fun for me and if it seems like a chore I take a respite. But here goes a brief account of my very interesting finale to the Poland trip, with this post, and the next one.
Recounting Auschwitz is going to be really hard, and thats part of the reason I kept delaying this post, but I know I must. Please be warned: the rest of this post is clearly going to be depressing and maybe even disturbing to read. The pictures are just of the camp area, you are not allowed to photograph inside the blocks.
Oswiecim:
From Poznan we took a late night train to Oswiecim. The train leaves after midnight, and you make one change at Karowice (I think thats the city), at about 5am. Its not bad, because you kind of doze off (not very comfortably since we didn’t get sleeper berths, which cost more), and wake up at the station. It beats wasting a day traveling. The whole train ride cost 46 zlotys or about $15 one way, which was a great price. We reached Oscwiecim around 8:00am on the 29th. It was freezing cold. This part of Poland is much colder than the Poznan area, and accordingly I was well-layered. With the large number of foreign tourists that come to visit Auschwitz year round, the station is fully equipped for non-Polish speakers. Information on buses to the camp are readily available, and all the staff speak English. There’s a place to keep your suitcases, which was extremely convenient. Around 8:30am we took a bus to get us to Auschwitz. Its only about a 20 minute walk from the railway station, I think, but it was too cold for walking. I remember someone saying that as you got closer to the camp it got colder, almost like the place had a horrible freezing effect on you.
We got there very early, before the large groups of tourists arrived (by 10am, even on December 29th, the place was packed). They provide guidebooks of both camps (Auschwitz I is the main one, closer to the city, and Aushwitz Birkenau is about a three mile walk along the ‘Interest Zone’). They mark out the route that shows you the key points of the camp, which is what we did. Everything in the camp was painful to walk through. You can’t rate anything on a scale of how horrible it was. We walked through the Polish exhibit (each country has its own exhibit. Poles formed the largest group of people killed at Auschwitz), then others chronicling life in the camps.
Entering the camp
Arbeit Macht Free, or Work Makes One Free.
This is at the entrance to the camp itself. Prisoners walked across here daily, and roll call was held here for hours. Those shot while trying to escape were hung from a post nearby in clear view, to warn the others.
The majority of those held here were men. Women were brought here starting 1942, when the gynecologist Carl Clauberg conducted experiments on Jewish women in one of the blocks of this camp. Josef Mengele also conducted his horrible, gruesome and blood chilling experiments in this camp also.
We walked through exhibits that chronicled what happened at each step. If you’ve read Elie Wiesel’s works, or anything related to the Holocaust, you know what those steps are. Belongings stripped away. Clothes stripped off. Shaving. Either the disinfecting baths or straight to the gas chambers. Its horrific. One block chronicles the barracks and living arrangements. Another chronicles the plight of the children. Another Mengele’s experiments, and on, and on.
In most of the blocks the walls are lined with framed pictures of the prisoners. Rows and rows and rows of faces of men and women. These were taken when the inmates first arrived (towards the end, the SS stopped taking these pictures). Most are sober, in some faces there is confusion, fright, astonishment, others look harried, exhausted, yet others are questioning, angry, frustrated. Here and there, though, there is a slight innocent smile (perhaps hoping the smile would soften the cruel photographer?), or even the calm and smile of rebellion. These rows of pictures are still vivid in my memory.
The Execution Wall
Hundreds of men were executed by the SS against the wall here. There is a small room that shows the cleaning area through which those doomed for this wall passed through and stripped before walking out and being shot. It is chilling.
There were special rooms for those who were willing to act as spies for the SS. These are more furnished, clearly different from the grass wooden barracks that 5-6 people shared in the blocks in the freezing cold. No sanitary systems were installed earlier, these only came later and were minimal and very unhygienic. Prisoners were dressed in the striped shirt and pajama uniform that almost everyone remembers. Small colored triangles coded them: Pole, Jew, Gypsy, Homosexual, German criminal…
Prisoners were hung here publicly as a lesson to others
Another block contains an exhibit about the resistance. This is one of the most profound parts of the museum. The resistance is what brought the news out of what was happening in Auschwitz. The members were individuals of unbelievable courage. Some even got arrested and thrown into Auschwitz just so they may chronicle what was happening, escape and tell the world. Others maintained the spirit in the camp. In a place where such an idea was unimaginable, hope still existed and ran through the camp. In fact, prisoners even fought against their own sorrow to look at their situation with black humor, the only way they could survive it. I stood there amazed and struck by a single thought: here I stood on the grounds of a place where the worst, cruelest, most unimaginable crimes against humanity were committed, and this is also the place which is the greatest proof of the resilience of human spirit, the tenacity of humanity. The will to survive, to live, to tell one’s story to the world, the will to just be fought through all the evil and cruelty and pain and torture here, and continued to exist. Nothing and no one could exterminate that, with no technique in the world. It is an amazing, wondrous thought. It increases one’s respect for humanity tremendously. It led me to question: would I have the strength, the desire to fight to live? Or would I be unable to tolerate the horror of my condition? Millions were held at Auschwitz, and according to the last study done in 1990, 1.1 million died. Most were killed by the gas chambers, others by starvation or torture, forced labor, executions, disease and experimentation. A very small percentage killed themselves.
Isn’t it ironic that a monument to how depraved humanity can be is also a monument to how magnificent and strong human spirit can be?
What is most terrifying of the Holocaust, and of Auschwitz, is how organized it was. Genocide has happened to every ethnicity, at one point or another in history. The Partition of India is marked by mass genocide that was never recognized or recorded. The Rwandan genocide, the genocide occuring in Darfur…However, it is chilling to observe how organized and efficient the Holocaust was. Records were kept, pictures taken by the SS, detailed notes taken…it was no mob mentality, violent uprising, no short period of knives and axes. It was a very planned and carefully executed genocide, an idea that sickens one to the stomach. That, I think, is one of the worst parts. Perhaps this has not been the only time, perhaps such an organized murder has taken place somewhere else at some other time in history, but this is one that is known, documented, studied, recorded, whose signs have been preserved. This happened only about 60 years ago.
It took a lot of strength for me to write this post and recount my walk through camp I. Thus, its broken, incomplete, and kind of in pieces joined together. Bringing myself back to it is something that I hate to do, but I continually keep doing. I want to remember it as much as I want to forget it. I haven’t been able to write a lot, not as much as I remember, because I just can’t. It makes me shudder everytime I think of it. I have been reading of the Holocaust since I was about 10, when I first read The Diary of Anne Frank, and by the time I was 15 I had read so much that I was actually forbidden by my parents to read anymore, since it had made me such a wreck. I always knew that if I had the chance, I would visit Auschwitz, and throughout my trip to Poland I dreaded this part. Reading about it is one thing, seeing everything makes it so real that it quite literally shocks you and shakes you inside. I’m not a weak person, and I do not shy away from a lot, but I did not have the strength for this. After camp I, I was so troubled that I could not go to Birkenau, which is the larger camp, and the extermination camp (and would have been many times more disturbing). K, who I respect for being much stronger than me, was not able to go either and very understandable agreed that we leave. I just knew that if I walked through Birkenau I would be in a terrible state and be haunted for a much, much longer time, and I just could not bring myself to it. I hope that one day I will be stronger and more prepared, and return to see the entire museum, because I believe it is something I must do. I must see it all, and talk about it, and tell others. We must all remember. K told me once when I was very apprehensive about going that it was very obviously something everyone fears, it is understandable that I was terrified. But no matter what, she said, it had to be something everyone must do. Everyone must fully realize the extent of what happened and remember it, no matter how difficult it might be.
I left Auschwitz terrified and trembling inside. I thought over everything I’d seen for a long time, then blocked it out. Occasionally, since coming back, when telling someone about my trip, I will think back and remember the faces. I’ll remember the block with the large expanse of eyeglasses, scattered toothbrushes, hairbrushes, torn and broken dolls. I’ll remember each part of our walk, what I saw and how I felt. I know I’ll always remember. I hope it will always affect me. I hope it will drive my human rights work, and each time I question the use of what I do or get tired of fighting I’ll remember that walk. I’ll remember that strength of the people who lived there, their desire to live, their hope, their tenacity to fight, that still breathes and can be felt in the walls.
I’ll remember it all.
If anybody else has any suggestions to improve, do pass on!
