Auschwitz

I just returned from Auschwitz a few hours ago. I'm unsure of what to write, because anything I say is going to sound trite or affected. So I guess I'll just write what I saw and felt being there.

Before getting into the actual visit itself, a little prologue. I couldn't sleep last night. We got to bed around 3 a.m. and had to be up early so we could meet the guy who was going to drive us the 50 miles from Krakow to Auschwitz. Right before i went to sleep, I made the mistake of looking at some pictures of Auschwitz on Flickr. Smart move. I could not get my mind to stop after that. I woke up dreading the trip and was queasy the entire car ride, which took almost an hour due to the traffic on the two-lane highway.

Auschwitz is comprised of two camps. The smaller, main camp, is the one you hear about the most. It's the one with the sign in the front that says "Work Brings Freedom" in German. What a joke. I learned later that on the very first day of their confinement, the prisoners were told that they "had come to a concentration camp, from which the only way to escape is through the crematorium chimney."

You walk in, pass the ENORMOUS crowds -- I'm telling you, it was as packed as an amusement park on a summer Saturday -- and through a gathering center they set up, and you're right there. Shamrock and I explored the camp on our own, after buying a guide, which cost about 3 zloty. The first thing you notice about the place is the simple brick structures that served as housing for all the Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, political prisoners, and Soviet and Polish POWs who were held there. Everything in Auschwitz was mapped out with surgical precision by the Nazis, from dividing up the new arrivals into viable and non-viable workers, the latter of whom were immediately sent to the gas chambers and executed. 70-75% of the people who arrived at Auschwitz were deemed unfit to work and killed immediately. They took all the gold they could gather, human hair, children's clothes. They took everything they could take and shipped it back to Deutschland. Nice, eh?

232,000 children passed through Auschwitz. They were treated exactly like adults, and when I say that, I mean I saw plenty of pictures of dead children today. Shot, gassed children. Children splayed on the ground, with their arms outstretched in a death pose. Boys in coffin boxes. I saw pictures of emaciated children who endured yet another Nazi extermination strategy: death by starvation. If you were a twin, you were slightly more lucky, though I guess that's a matter of opinion. Mengele like twins for experimentation purposes, so they were kept alive as long as possible and medical experiments were performed on them. A movie we saw at the end of the visit showed a young girl, no older than 9, who had been forced to stand in the snow all day. She had frostbite on both of her legs and when the camp was liberated, doctors were trying to figure out whether they needed to amputate.

I'd heard stories about Auschwitz before, but I had no idea that the Nazis massacred children too, and so cavalierly. That was shocking to me. And it's one thing to hear a story. When you're there, and you're walking through the barracks they converted into museums, it hits home. This is where 1.5 million people were exterminated like diseased animals. You still see the barbed wire, the warning signs with skulls in German, the huge building that held the Zyklon B, the killing wall where they shot people for almost no reason, the stacks of suitcases Jews brought from Greece and Hungary because they were told they were going to be "resettled," the discarded pile of metal-framed glasses, the toothbrushes... You see all this and you wonder, how the fuck could anyone -- even a Nazi soldier -- be this inhumane, this evil towards another group of people? How could they kill with such impunity? With such zeal? In such a methodical, murderously efficient, and utterly depraved way? It hit me in the stomach and it wouldn't leave, a mixture of shock, disappointment, anger, vengefulness, and sorrow.

But it was an overwhelming feeling of surreality that was the most prominent. Picture this. You're in a concentration camp that looks nearly the same as it was 60years ago, except instead of dead and dying prisoners in striped jail uniforms walking around, there are a bunch of European, Israeli, and Asian tourists who are massing around the place on a beautiful sunny day. You look in a large wooden building and see the holes the prisoners were forced to go to the bathroom in, you imagine the smell and disease and filth that must have existed, then you walk outside and see a white sign that says "WC" and points you to the bathroom, which also holds sinks with running water. Surreal.

And I don't want to say the vibe was Disney-like -- people were not that callous -- but it wasn't nearly as respectful as it should have been. People were talking on cell phones as they were walking towards the crematorium where thousands of innocent people were discarded like garbage, some people were joking and laughing at different points; others were taking pictures together, smiling, in front of watchtowers and barbed wire. It was totally fucked. It was the same type of shit that happened for years after 9/11 at "Ground Zero." Shamrock couldn't believe it when two people asked him to take their picture in front of the "Welcome to Auschwitz" sign. "Are you serious?" he asked them. Yes, they were. So he took the picture. They wore big smiles and will, no doubt, be pleased with his effort when they return home to show their friends what a great fucking time they had at Auschwitz. Seriously, what is wrong with people? It was really hard to put yourself in that mental place, to imagine the killing that suffering that went on where I was standing. Every step I took, felt like hallowed ground and yet, if you didn't know better, you'd think you were walking in some strange, barbed wire park with brick buildings in it.

That is, until you got to the most nauseating part of today's experience, the crematorium. Imagine walking into a walled off croncete building low to the ground and getting this close to the four, large ovens that converted hundreds of thousands of bodies into ash at a rate of 350 a day from 1939 through 1944. It was nearly pitch black under there, and I didn't stay very long. I'll post some of the pictures I took when I get home. Sickening.

After visiting the smaller camp (Auschwitz I), we drove over to the massive, second camp a short distance away, called Birkenau (Auschwitz II). Birkenau is sprawling, 425 acres big, with over 300 buildings and 4 crematoria with gas chambers. It was huge. At this camp, they had prisoner barracks you could walk into which were kept as they were 60 years ago. Once in there, you got just a lick of the misery these people endured day after sorry day. Dark, suffocating, crumbling boxes with small windows. There were these tiny, wooden beamed bunk beds that looked more like open-fronted coffins than places to sleep. The concrete floor served as another bed level. Walking around Birkenau, Shamrock and I couldn't believe how many crematorium chimneys there were. They were brick fingers extending into the sky. A big "Fuck You" to God and everyone else. Barbed wire ringed the place, and cutting through the middle of the camp like a metal knife was a long railroad track that split halfway into the camp. Left for life (temporarily), right for the gas chamber.

It was exhausting and surreal. Maybe I have a problem living in the present. Maybe that's an issue for me to work on. But when I visit places like Hiroshima or Auschwitz, it's a mindfuck. I can't put my head on it and feel it as much as I want to. It's amazing what that generation lived through, how much suffering and pain and death and hunger and loss. It's amazing so many people went along with Nazism and allowed the Holocaust to happen. Then again, history has a way of repeating itself, doesn't it? The world has done a 180 from 60 years ago, but we still had Cambodia, where millions of people died. We still had Rwanda and Bosnia. W're human beings. Genocide is a disease that won't be cured anytime soon. Maybe more people should visit Auschwitz. Maybe that will help.