Auschwitz

Auschwitz Blog:

A night after my English and Arts immersion camp had ended, I was staying at a hotel with my co-teachers in Krakow. I called home to tell my family that I was going to Auschwitz on Sunday. In low unison, they said, “Oh.”

“Oh” was the only thought I could form in my head at that moment as well. How can you imagine what people felt being taken there? As a kid, I had this morbid curiosity about the depths of evil. Just how bad was bad? Were such things even real? I studied books and images of emaciated humans, looked up experiments and the various ways people were murdered and stripped of their humanity. I searched it all, fueled by my question, “is it real?” How could such horrors exist? As my view of the world shifted, it contorted and shaped itself in those years of my childhood. I never thought that one day I would see the place I considered so far away and removed from my life.

As I came to know different people in Poland, I saw history come to life in their eyes, in their voices as personal histories and the country’s story was told to me. I didn’t know a place could be still so aware of its past. I mentally dug my heels in as I came towards the visit to Auschwitz, but I knew I must be a witness. I must see it. My thoughts and any discomfort are nothing to the reality millions were forced into.

At Auschwitz, we all know what is there. But there is something about numbers and spacial evidence that could prove the enormity of something. I stood in one of the bunkhouses, now a museum, staring at the long glass display and the tons of human hair on display behind it. This massive amount was only a representational fraction of how many people were exterminated at camp but, seeing that many extinguished lives was staggering. I stood there and stared, and was left behind by the tour.

Of the evidence on display, I never knew how systematic the whole operation was. The goal here was to obliterate an entire population. But I wondered, why be so systematic as to painstakingly keep records of everyone that passes through? Of thousands of prisoners, pictures were taken, numbers given, and trophies were taken. The pictures on the walls of the prisoners looked like hunting trophies. Objects such as luggage, combs, and glasses were taken away, but I’ll never understand why all the hair was kept. There was such a fear of lice, I was surprised it wasn’t just burned or thrown away. I later learned that it was all saved to be sold back to factories throughout Germany and turned into countless materials.

As I kept up with our tour, I slipped and stumbled up and back down the bunker stairs. Each stone step sank deeply, worn away by the millions of feet who have tramped up and down the halls. Outside in the sunny sidewalks, I felt shame as I realized my annoyance over my aching feet.

At the end of the tour, we were shown a home, right outside the camp. It was a normal home where children would run into their father’s arms when he came home, where the loving wife set the table for dinner and talked about her day. It was a normal life and a real family except that the father of the household oversaw and managed the extermination camp where 8,000 souls were extinguished every twenty minutes when all four chambers were running in unison out at Birkenau (Auschwitz was the camp, Birkenau was the location of the gas chambers etc.)

Saying the Nazis were “monsters” is too easy.

A bad human is scarier than a monster. It is easy to say that a monster is evil because a monster has no human attributes, emotions or attachments. Monsters are something to scare you in the dark, something to haunt your dreams. But a human being committing a monster’s actions is harder to digest. A human—someone like you or me—can commit such atrocities. This thought is terrifying in its reflective transparency. How could someone become that? What conditions in our human society created an outcome like that? Where did our societies, teachings, values, and humanity go astray?

In the place where humanity cries, these are my thoughts.

I don’t need to tell you what happened there. Or what I saw. We all know. On a different scale, we see it happen again and again as something in our human culture falters into human atrocities. Genocide has happened since, gun violence and all other violent crimes.

Near one of the collapsed gas chambers, a long length of barbed wire fences—the curling wire nailed to posts—stretched away from me. A man in a yellow rain jacket stuck his hand and his phone through the toothy metal. He put his arm around a girl next to him and they lifted their hands in mock terror for an Auschwitz-selfie behind the barbed wire fence.

When I left the train platforms and furnaces at Birkenau, the sky grew dark and the wind picked up. I willed it to rain with every fiber of my body. I wanted to see the rain pour down and drain away every shadow here but, I know the rain can’t wash away the bricks and stones embedded in our history.