Krakow & Auschwitz

We arrived by train from Toruń last night to Krakow, a city more beautiful than I imagined. How it is that I knew next to nothing about it, I don't know. I've realized that my knowledge of Poland in general has been very limited - I laugh about it now, but really, the images I had of Poland were of black and white pre-war photos of people in heavy coats with fur collars bustling through the streets of Warsaw, and of communist-era triumphal modern architecture ... I knew a few other details, but really had a very naive, simple and antiquated image of this country. The past 2 weeks have opened my eyes to a wonderful country with a rich and complex history, and with gracious, welcoming people, who have (obviously) advanced with all the rest of us ... I've humbly acknowledged that I may not always be as informed, up-to-date and reasonably knowledgeable about the world as I often imagine. This experience has been an valuable lesson in the importance of seeing things for oneself ...

Now the part I don't want to write about ... today's trip was beyond anything I had imagined. I have read books, I have seen dramas and documentaries, I've heard survivors tell their stories, I've grown up knowing about the horrors of Auschwitz. Dad & I had long conversations over the past week about whether to go or not; we had the idea that the packaged tours would be somehow manipulative, that they'd be designed to ellicit an emotional reaction, and after Stutthof we were both put off by the idea of being forced into something similar again. We thought, we've seen a concentration camp, we don't need to see another one.

But eventually we both agreed that, being here, it would be a dishonour to our ancestors NOT to see it simply because it might make us uncomfortable - we tried to arrange for a private guide who could get us access to the archives so we could find some record of our people, but it wasn't possible. So, grudgingly, we agreed to take one of the packaged tours.

We arrived in Oswiecim (the town next to the camp) and were put off by what seemed like blatant commercialism - we have a new local guide here, Tomasz, who drove us to Oswiecim, and he parked in a little shopping mall next to the camp entrance. It seemed wrong to have a burger and pizza joint so close to this terrible place. Our preconceptions seemed confirmed, at least for now.

We crossed the street to the camp entrance, and again, were put off by the dozens upon dozens of tour buses - students, foreigners, Poles - all coming to be shocked, we thought. I commented on the great irony of being herded like cattle to consume a tourist-geared sanitized and dramatized version of this place, while so many hundreds of thousands, or millions, had been herded like cattle in very different conditions 65 years ago.

Then we entered the cinema. And our preconceptions began to change. The screening room was packed full (as was every place we visited); they showed a short film showing what the Red Army found when it liberated Auschwitz. It was the first of many exhibits that made clear to me the purpose of this museum: the importance of bearing witness.

Nothing in the Auschwitz museum - the entire camp is a museum, and is a UNESCO world heritage site - nothing was manipulative. The guides weren't crying; they weren't angry; they weren't telling us what to feel, what to think, how to interpret all of this. They showed us what was there, how the spaces had been used, what had been found in the camp at the time of liberation - and it was overwhelming beyond words. It became clear to me in a way I'd never quite grasped before just how sadistic and psychopathic these people were - these weren't individually cruel people who liked to humiliate and beat prisoners; this was an entire institutionalized system of sadism, torture and greed on a scale I never imagined, even after all the evidence I've seen through other means. Words fail me; "The world went crazy", "It was hell on earth", "It was like stepping into another planet", and all the other descriptions I've heard can't do justice to the extreme cruelty, the insanity, the enormity of this crime beyond any scale imaginable.

As I walked through the camp and saw the various exhibits - the mounds and mounds of women's hair collected to weave cloth for the textile industry; the mounds and mounds of shoes; the mountain of glasses; the mountain of hair and toothbrushes; the clothes, household goods, suitcases collected in gigantic piles daily from the thousands of innocents arriving by train to be redistributed or sold in Germany ... as I saw the different prison cells (there were special prisons in this gigantic collective prison, an insanity in itself), the isolation cells, the suffocation cells, the standing cells -less than 1m2, solid brick, with a tiny door at floor level (maybe 60x60cm) where 4 or 6 prisoners at a time were forced to crawl through and face a punishment of standing for anywhere from 3 days to 6 weeks, with no room to move, no light ... as I saw the camp commander's house adjacent to the camp, with a clear view of the chimney of one of the crematoria, where his children played happily in the manicured garden ... as I saw walked through the gas chamber in Auschwitz I and past the ruins of the larger gas chambers and crematoria in Auschwitz II ... as I walked through this, my mind could not process the fact that this had REALLY happened, that this wasn't a creation of some sick, twisted imagination ... and at the same time, I knew that my ancestors lived this, somehow survived long enough to be transferred to Stutthof (which must have seemed civilized in comparison to this hell) ...

Words fail me at this point. I don't feel this text even begins to do justice to what I saw in a few hours at this camp. Anything I write has been written about before; others' words are much more powerful. I understand why there is so much emphasis on this place when learning about the Shoah ... this was so much more than a few sadistic guards. This was about mass-produced torture, suffering and humiliation. Having seen it with my own eyes, I understand it even less than before.

I'm also saddened that so many people come here only to see this horror, and bypass the beauty of this country and the graciousness and hospitality of its people. This journey has been difficult and painful at times, but I feel privileged to be able to undertake it in the way we have.