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 Poland 2002 - AuschwitzIn America, your idea of a historic site may be a wind-swept battlefield where people (more or less) willingly met their ends fighting for their beliefs or the beliefs of their government. Or perhaps you think of Williamsburg, Virginia, where you can watch a guy in a quaint colonial costume make horseshoes. So nothing in the States had really prepared me for the mind-numbing depression that accompanies a trip to Auschwitz. In case you're an idiot, I should explain that Auschwitz was a concentration camp used by the Nazis to murder mind-bogglingly large numbers of people. Here you can see how human hair was transformed into women's stockings. Or gaze at a giant model demonstrating the use of the gas chambers. Or look at an old Nazi poster featuring a magnified louse and a screaming skull, accompanied by the words, "Get lice and it will be the end of you!"  Auschwitz I, the smaller of the two camps, has largely been converted into a museum documenting various aspects of prisoner life. In one building we gazed at a wall of photographs of children; each image was accompanied by the child's date of arrival and date of death. Not all of them died in the camp, I was happy to learn. Just most of them. I was pushed a little over the edge by a picture of a cute gypsy girl staring into the camera, her eyes filled with tears. She didn't make it.
 There's a heaviness in the air, here—"psychological suffocation," I might call it. One woman strolled past wiping tears out of her eyes with a handkerchief. A man stood silently by bullet-riddled wall where thousands met their ends, just staring at the candles. This was a long ways from horseshoe-making.
For Polish kids on a field trip, the experience is very different. We watched a group of what looked to be middle school-aged students laughing and chatting as any comparable group of Americans would. You can't hate them for being disrespectful, of course—they're just kids on a field trip. But the sight made me wonder if the power of Auschwitz is fated to diminish over time, as the lives of those who perished so terribly become more distant from our own. I am reminded of Andersonville prison in Georgia, a former POW camp for Union Army Civil War soldiers, many of whom died horribly. Feeling sorry for the soldiers is easy, but feeling sorrow is harder.  Perhaps I am wrong. The holocaust was the result of a skillfully deployed propaganda machine—something we can all relate to today. And the sheer variety of people who were snuffed out in it—millions of victims of all ages, sexes, and backgrounds—also makes it easy to identify with their plight. As one gazes at photographs into the eyes of men, women, and children who were so horrifically treated, one communes with people locked in an eternal present. Their horror is timeless.
Auschwitz II, Birkenau is even more oppressive. This huge camp is where the majority of the prisoners were finished off—mainly in two enormous gas chambers constructed at the end of the grounds. The chambers were blown up by the fleeing Nazis towards the end of the war, but the rubble remains. A sprawling memorial to the victims was constructed here, but I was most moved by a simple wreath lying at the end of the shorn tracks.  Poland's weather being what it is, many of the wooden cabins where the prisoners lived have rotted away, leaving only the brick chimneys. But a large number have been preserved, and you can wander into them and take a look around. From certain vantage points, I can't imagine that the camp has changed all that much since the 1940's. I should think, for a survivor returning to Auschwitz, it would be quite overpowering.
Perhaps the most moving aspect of Auschwitz is the conversion of former machines of death into memorials for the victims. Flower bouquets and votive candles are set up at the base of a shooting wall; trays once used for sliding skeletal corpses into tiny ovens are now covered with candles and wreathes. The official museum Web site is here. Written and posted Thanksgiving 2002. Introduction to our Poland trip Krakow (1) Kryjowka, Krakow Auschwitz Lublin (1) Lublin (2) Warsaw The Park, Warsaw Some interesting information Some useful information
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