Auschwitz
In all honesty, I didn’t want to write a blog about visiting Auschwitz. It’s a serious place, and I’m not a very serious writer. What happened there is well known to us all, and I have nothing to add. Given this, it feels almost in poor taste. However, I decided I would write about my trip and the places I went, largely as a way of contextualizing and sharing my photos, and I’m not going to skip over perhaps the most important point I reached.
It was a surprisingly long journey by train from Prague, partly because the train idled for a long time near the border, partly because the town of Oświęcim (it’s proper Polish name) isn’t really on the way to anywhere. It’s out in the flat green countryside of southern Poland, and to get there I had to connect through Katowice and then go by local commuter rail. By the time I arrived it was already quite dark and cold; from the brightly-lit & recently rebuilt station, I walked about a mile along dim roads to the other side of town. There was nothing particularly historic or interesting along this way; just blank asphalt and miscellaneous businesses, a cheap restaurant here, a tire shop there. I’m not being quite fair to the town; I don’t think I really went to the best parts of it. That’s not why anyone goes there.
I stayed at the Catholic Centre for Dialogue and Prayer, built only a block from the first camp. It was as silent as the town around it, simple and spare. That night I watched Malick’s film A Hidden Life, about a conscientious objector from Austria during the war. It wasn’t directly related to the place I found myself, but it seemed apropos, felt correct.
In the morning, I toured the camps. For me, what surprised me most, although on reflection it shouldn’t have, was how normal everything felt. You arrive at what might be the single most horrifying place on earth, which is also an immense grave, and you come having been prepared for it by a lifetime of history and media. You expect great sorrow, and a sense of weighty reverence; you expect, perhaps, to cry. But mostly it just felt a little muted, a little hushed. It’s not a normal place, and yet in some sense it is. It was a sunny day, and everything felt very calm, and if you don’t have a direct connection to the place, it actually seems right to just be interested. It’s not really about you, after all.
Auschwitz I is in the town, and consists of normal brick buildings, with rows of trees and broad avenues. When you’ve been in Europe for two weeks, spending as much time as possible in the historical centers of cities, you almost don’t notice these buildings because they are so unremarkable, so dull. But that is itself the striking thing: these buildings are so modern, so much more recent than the average place you might stay in Europe, that they aren’t even worth noticing. That in itself is the greatest reminder of just how recent, how modern and contemporary this place is.
The interiors of the buildings create a double-effect, both emphasizing this sense of false normalcy – the flooring reminds me of the cheap tile still found in schools when I was growing up – but the rooms are filled with the detritus of lost lives. There are barracks, spare and uncomfortable, and yet not as bad as they would become at the second camp; there is a room, maybe fifty feet long, containing a pile of shoes that long and higher than my head; there is a whole room of crutches and prosthetic limbs, a reminder of the deliberate destruction of the disabled; there is a room of used canisters of gas; and there is an urn of human ashes, of who knows how many.
There was also a room which one is not allowed to photograph. This room has a pile as big as the pile of shoes – I would estimate perhaps fifteen feet deep, six feet high, and fifty feet long, though I have never been good at distances. This pile is made of women’s hair. It still retains some of its color – mostly brunette or grey, here and there a lock of blonde.
Outside is a yard where prisoners were shot; there’s a long gallows, where a group was killed after an uprising. And there is the first gas chamber and crematorium, still intact. The larger ones at the second camp were destroyed at the end of the war, which in some ways feels like a blessing.
Next to the gas chamber, only a short distance from the villa he lived in, stand the gallows on which the camp commandant, Rudolph Hoss, was executed after the war.
From Auschwitz I, it’s a short trip across town to the much larger Auschwitz II, the camp designed expressly as a death camp. This place feels surreal, simply because the image of the gate, with its guard tower, and the rail siding where people’s fate was instantly decided, are so etched into the collective cultural memory. It’s one thing to visit an old ruin, but it’s quite another to visit a place you’ve seen in film and historical photographs, and have it look, at least in parts, exactly as you are used to seeing it, only in color and sunlight.
There’s little more to say. Most of the barracks were destroyed, but a few still exist; there’s an example of one of the infamous rail cars. The gas chambers and crematoria are in ruins. Behind them is a large monument, with warnings to the future, reminders about the crimes committed, written in a dozen languages. Next to one of the gas chambers is a sort of sunken pond, a pit of grey mud, made of human ashes. The entire site, and the peaceful birch woods behind it, and the surrounding countryside, are all a grave – there is ash under the grass you walk on, under each rock and tree, extending out from there into the world, who knows how far.
