Written February 21, 2010
This weekend Natalie, Amy, Hannah, Sonya, and I boarded a plane to the Katawice airport in Poland to see Auschwitz. Looking back, I now realize that I didn’t know what I was getting into.
Poland was cold. Snow was falling on the tarmac as we disembarked our plane. Our cabby was waiting for us at the exit of the airport, an elderly Polish man who apologized repeatedly for his bad English, explaining that he had only had three months to learn. With a hurried and endearing sort of hospitality, Jan, our cabbie, helped us put our things in the truck and pile into his van. Then, he began to drive, and all of us began to pray for our lives. He couldn’t keep his hands on the wheel. He changed the music at least 20 times, no exaggeration, and showed off his ability to count in English by pointing out the temperature and skipping through each track on the CD, saying and pointing out the number at the same time. He kept picking up a brochure from Auschwitz and explaining all the different buildings. Then he picked up an album from off the floor in front of the passenger seat and began to flip through pictures of his family and past tourists. Meanwhile he swerved left and right across the road, coming dangerously close to running into other people. We were left praying for our lives.
Of course, our Cabbie would not be the most impacting thing about our trip. In fact, he turned out to be a source of comic relief, a gift in many ways. We spent our first day in Poland merely arriving, having dinner, and resting up. I knew at the time that Auschwitz, the camp itself, was just across the street, but it didn’t mean anything to me. Growing up, I’ve heard so much about concentration camps—the lack of food, the harsh weather and bad conditions, the dying. I guess I had sort of accepted it as part of the past, horrible, but still there. I hadn’t known it, but I had formed a kind of numbness against those cruelties—like knowing that man landed on the moon in 1969. It’s hard for me to consider that extraordinary. In my life, it has always been.
Things changed the next morning. We literally walked across the street to the camp, and signed up for the tour. I was laughing, feeling a little tired. The lady who helped us at the ticket counter informed us that we could take a four hour tour in English starting at ten-o-clock. We waited ten minutes and light heartedly entered the cinema marked “KINO” in polish.
Now, I’ve watched movies on the Holocaust before. I read Anne Frank when I was younger, and I certainly remember crying. In fact, our trip to Auschwitz was inspired by my reading many books in which concentration camps had critical roles: The Reader by Bernhard Schlink and Black Dogs by Ian McEwan. My point is that nothing prepared me for the movie that followed or for the camp itself. In the cinema we saw men and women who looked like walking skeletons, aged by starvation, cold, and torture. The footage was taken during liberation. Their faces were happy, their legs that of herons or storks—not humans. And around them there were corpses lying in the dirt in front of stark looking buildings. And then the mass graves of the dead. The men, women, and children who had survived being shot in the head for sharing their bread portions, who’d lost a leg to the frost bite they’d received from being forced to stand in the snow all day.
Then we moved on to the camp. Notoriously, there was the barbed wire, the bunkers so that the prisoners might be guarded even whilst the camp was under attack, the sign over the entrance that read in German, “Work Brings Freedom,” so much more than a lie, far worse than a falsehood. And then there were the displays: 7 tons of human hair behind glass, piled up in heaps, taken off the women when they first arrived had they been taken as prisoners, and off the dead if they had been chosen for cremation instead. Cut off the head in a braid. I’ll never be able to look at braided hair the same way again. The hair had been packed into bags and stored to be sent to German textile companies. There was even a display that held some of the fabric that had already been made. The hair glistened in the threadwork.
The whole camp was filled with atrocities: pictures of women taken by another prisoner with a smuggled camera. They ran naked, herded to their own death in the gas chambers. We even walked into the gas chambers themselves where something like 500 people were poisoned at a time. The poison basically caused them to suffocate. Later the prisoners would have to clean the bodies out, dragging them off to be cremated, they found them in heaps. The stronger ones had struggled to live at the top of the piles.
There was one room that contained pictures of young men and women who had been brought to the camp and selected to be prisoners. Most likely their family members had already been killed. Their hair had been shaved off. The Nazis took pictures for identification, bureaucrat as they were, but later learned that the pictures were useless—the camp changed the people too much. Underneath the pictures were the names and dates of imprisonment followed by the dates of their deaths. What stood out was their expressions: the tears in their eyes, their hopelessness, but most of all their youth. My brother is fourteen. I can imagine him with the same expression—the face swollen with sadness, the loneliness, but then I’m certain I can’t imagine it at all.
We left Auschwitz that night. Jan, the cabbie, picked us up from the hotel. I can’t imagine staying another night. We passed by Birkenau, where the women were housed in row upon row of wooden un-insulated horse stables and I’ll admit I was scared. I know there wasn’t any danger. I understand that Jan was relatively harmless, other than his driving skills, and that Birkenau has been empty since 1945, but my knowledge of it changed things. Still, we made it to the airport. We arrived in safe London. I slept quietly.
Looking back at Auschwitz, I don’t understand how people get to the point where they no longer appreciate a life. I can’t really look down on the people who did it. I suppose I’m made no different than them. I can love things and I can hate things and I can even be ignorant. I have the ability, and it scares me. Had I been in their situation, had I been conditioned in the way they were under such propaganda and social pressure, I might have been like them. In Black Dogs, one of the characters talks about this kind of evil, saying, “The evil I’m talking about lives in us all. It takes hold in an individual, in private lives, within a family, and then it’s children who suffer most. And then, when the conditions are right, in different countries, at different times, a terrible cruelty, a viciousness against life erupts, and everyone is surprised by the depth of hatred within himself. Then it sinks back and waits. It’s something in our hearts.”
Part of me wishes grass could grow up around Auschwitz and we could let nature take its course; claim the barns and the torture cells and the gas chambers. Rid the world of them. But I suppose it’s all about the evolution of our hearts: striking a cord of emotion—remembering.
