The camps; the reason (the only reason) that we included Poland in our little series of adventures. I wasn´t looking forward to this. I knew we had to see it and I knew that´s why we had come, but I didn't particular want to go.
We had caught a bus, taking about 90 minutes, to Oswiecim. Oswiecim was the Polish name for Auschwitz, the town at which the site of unspeakable things had happened. Of course, the town itself was taken out of existence at the time, with the Nazis moving the people away, for the isolation of this place, and using the materials from their houses in the construction of the camps. We didn't actually go into the town though. We arrived at the info centre / entrance to the camp.
Our tour started about 11am. The first thing was an information video about the history of the camp. The voice-over sounded like it had a Polish accent, spoken in English, but I wasn´t sure if it sounded like it was an old recording. It described a lot about the place, including things we hadn't really been taught about in all our holocaust education, and presentations at school. The camp was originally an internment camp for political prisoners and POWs. They used to say political prisoners but really they were just ethnic Polish people, incarcerated due to the Nazi regime.
There was video footage in the film, taken, I think, by the soldiers of the red army, who finally liberated the camp. It´s pretty confronting to see bodies reduced to bone, faces drained of life, and people drained of all that should make them human. I think people usually try to dissociate themselves from a personal connection with those who perished or suffered during the holocaust. It´s easier to think of them as statistics, as numbers adding up to that tragic amount, and not as people, not as individuals. I know I do that on occasion; things like this are often just too heavy to deal with.
After the video we picked up headsets and went outside. Two things immediately caught my attention; the slogan wrought across the main gate, and the barbed wire fencing, stretching as far as you could see. The slogan translated to work means freedom. Infuriating. It was not enough for the Nazis to systematically enact genocide but they mocked those that wiped out. The nature of the camps, and of the forced deportation and relocation of the Jews (and others) was based on a cruel joke, stripping the victims of their dignity.
We moved from there into several barracks buildings outfitted with museum displays and information. I was a bit torn as to how I felt about this. I saw the logic in using these buildings, in turning them from places of torment and death into something that could pass on the wisdom for it to never be repeated. On the other hand I was outraged at how they had stripped the sanctity from those places. Part of me felt that they should have been left intact, not only standing as a stronger image of what had occurred but also because of what these places had seen. I don´t think they should have been desecrated like that. Putting an exhibit in one of the rooms, and behind glass, separates its contents from a person, and really diminishes the experience to being just a show and not something that one can connect to.
The exhibits were interesting though. The Nazi paperwork in display cabinets was disturbing. The Nazis made it so dehumanised. How is it possible that a person can disconnect from morality, from empathy, so much as that, to transform the murder of countless lives into an academic endeavour where their only concerns were based on the efficiency of their extermination and what they could recycle from the lives they took.
We reached barrack 11 where things like torture and isolation rooms were kept, as well as offices for the Gestapo. There was the basement room where they first experimented with the Zyclon B gas, attempting to discover the right amount to use to exterminate their victims. Again, I cringed at the soullessness of it all, that it was purely a problem of mathematics and science, and the value of life was merely shoved aside or forgotten.
The wall of death was there, where they executed prisoners. I pictured the people there, begging for mercy, trying to comprehend the situation, how their innocence and their rights meant nothing. I pictured how quickly those lives were then taken away.
The last thing to see at Auschwitz itself was the gas chamber / crematorium. Although this little room only killed several thousands, a small amount compared to other such places, it was easily as important since it was where they started it all. In this room there weren´t even some of the lies and nicities of the other installations; people were just stripped naked outside then herded in and extinguished en mass. It was very heavy walking through there. I made an effort to just have a look and get out quickly, not to linger there at all.
We then walked back to the visitor´s centre and boarded shuttle a bus to go to Birkenau. The trip was short; the camps had been constructed quite close to each other. Again, barbed wire. Stretching in every direction, as fas as the eye could see. Caged in. Like cattle, to the Nazis. The main gate was still there but most of the barracks from all the separate sections were gone. The people rebuilding their towns had plundered the materials to make their homes. They used the planks of wood, the metal supports, that had formed the walls of those places that had seen such suffering, of which the smell of death probably still lingered. This had apparently stopped when the site was declared as a historical site and given the according protection.
The lack of the barracks drew some of the effect away, I think, that one might have had looking at the camp in its entirety. The grass had grown over the dirt courtyards and up to the train tracks. Green. Endless green covering the ground in all directions; the grass trying to hide the horror of the place. The green did, I suppose, give the place a kind of beauty, of peace and of rest. I wasn´t sure if a place like this deserved that.
We stopped into a few of the barracks there. The conditions were dismal but I doubt any of us in this day could appreciate what it was actually like. We were merely tourists in empty buildings, separated by time to what the real experience was.
We walked up to the memorial. By this time the sky had clouded over; not grey but blue, heavy, filled with rain. Slight rain drops made their way down to us, but only a few. The light was slightly dim and the grass emitted a deep green glow. It was quite surreal; there was such an atmosphere there, almost perfectly timed for when we reached the memorial and the destroyed crematoriums next to it.
I have to admit, I was quite happy when we started to make our way back towards the gate. After hours of this I was ready to head back to Krakow and get on with our trip.
When we got back to Krakow we got our bags and headed to the new hostel, ARS. Really great, small hostel with very friendly and helpful staff. Good location too.
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