My poor friend Liz: when asked why I was in Poland on Wednesday, she didn't know. To be honest, I'm still not entirely sure why I went. Well, I do know partly. I went in my mostly-discarded (because, really, I wasn't very good at it), role as a historian. My first degree involved a course on Jewish History 1750-1945. We looked at Shetls, at the Jewish Salons, I managed to turn Kafka into a farce, and we looked at the Shoah, or Holocaust. We never had a seminar on that. Ever. Still, I felt the need to write a long essay on the subject of 'Is it fair to argue that the Jews failed to resist the Nazis'. No brainer... but I had to prove it in 10,000 words. If anyone wants it, I'll email.
Last Tuesday, I was at a ceremony to acknowledge Maria Kortarba as one of the Righteous Among the Nations. Yad Vashem explain what that is... and Maria's story can be found here. I got to talking with various members of Yad Vashem UK, and one of them said 'you can't possibly imagine what it's like'. I replied that I felt I had as good an idea as I could have, owing to the amount of literature I'd read for the long essay: it is truly shocking what the Nazis did to the Jews, and, to a lesser extent, to Poles, Ukrainians, Latvians, Roma, Russians and Prisoners of War. They assumed that there would be no witnesses... They were very, very wrong.
It transpired that there was a trip (it sounds so jolly "Let's go on a trip!") to two of the camps, Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II (also known as Auschwitz-Birkenau) the following week, after my return to Connecticut. The idea was, apparently, so that students could go and see, and get a bit of an idea... and they invited me to go along. So I did. Because, let's face it, opportunities to further knowledge don't come along often. I may not get the opportunity to do this again. I don't really think I want the opportunity to do it a second time. Once was quite enough.
And, at 5 am on Wednesday this week, I was checking in at Luton airport, with a plane load of Jewish people (I mention this because I think this very greatly coloured my experience). We were all a little keyed up.
My first reaction on seeing Auschwitz I was 'Isn't it pretty'. The sun was shining, the trees were just turning: it didn't rival New England, but for someone who is used more to concrete than to trees, there were a lot of trees. The brick buildings, for all the ghastly things that went on in them, were sturdily built and, for army barracks, attractive. It may have been the fatigue, but there was a certain unreal quality to walking through that famous gate. We walked round with an excellent guide, and that was when reality started to assert itself. As much as reality can assert itself when you're with a Rabbi with a drum to beat (that the Poles haven't come to terms with what happened on their soil, and don't really acknowledge the fact that it was mostly Jews that affected by the Holocaust), and surrounded by a group of snap happy people. I felt very odd taking photographs. I wouldn't have taken so many had I not had a request from James to take pictures for him, as he'd lost many of his pictures from previous visits. If I say that one gentleman had brought his own photographer along with him, you may grasp how important it was for some people to have photographs.
It was almost too much to take in: imagine, if you will, an area about the size of a private swimming pool. The type people often have in their back gardens. This was full of hair that had been shaven off prisoners. It's very faded now, and looked a lot like fleece. A similarly sized area was full of suitcases and baskets. Twice that space was taken up by shoes. Thousands of pairs of shoes. There was a smashed doll. And a small, latvian style knitted mitten. I didn't want to look in the case which contained items that had been taken from children. I only looked quickly. There was a length of fabric made of human hair. People in Germany were wearing clothes made from human hair. I don't know if they even knew its source.
And, constantly, our guide reminded us of how the Jews had been brought in. How many there were. How the children, for the most part, had been sent straight to the chambers (some lived in a children's camp, under a mural of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: the last film many of them had seen).
The block where Mengele performed his barbaric experiments was, mercifully, shut. I couldn't bring myself to walk towards the gallows, or the wall of death. The cells at the bottom of the prison within the prison had me aching to be out in the open air. The gas chamber was chilling. Utterly chilling: and someone was taking photographs as we walked through. Thousands, hundreds of thousands of people had died in that room, and he took photographs. There was almost another death.
We went into the barrack where there's an exhibition about the Jews. It wasn't the best exhibition. It was somewhat obscure. There's a small room in that barrack for prayer. We all crowded in, with various members of the Israeli police force, and prayed. The prayer for the victims of the Holocaust, El Molei Rachamim (I can't find an MP3 of this) was played over speakers, and we gazed at candles, and we all felt very sad. In my case, I also felt immensely guilty that the British Government had not got it's act together during the War and bombed those trainlines leading to the camps.
Auschwitz II, or Birkenau, or Auschwitz-Birkenau, is about fifteen minutes coach ride away.
That place is big. Auschwitz I is contained: it's not that big. The size of several rugby pitches. 400m by 150m, according to my reckoning using the map we were given.
Auschwitz II is more like the size of Regent's Park. And possibly then some. It is enormous: 2000m by 3300m at its extremes. You can't see from one end to the other. The wooden buildings were razed to the ground by the Nazis, two of the gas chambers were blown up by the Nazis: a revolt by the prisoners destroyed the third. As a killing factory goes, it was chilling. It was a factory of death, and, the scale of this was shocking. So many buildings to kill people slowly. And then some more to kill them a little more quickly. Stop now. Wait fifteen minutes before you read on. That's how long it took those furthest away from the vents to die from the inhalation of Zyklon B gas.
It was freezing cold, the wind had blown up, the sun was gone, and it took me two days to feel properly warm again.
It was horrible. I don't have the words to describe how horrible it was. Immense, and huge, and horrible, and it wasn't the only death camp. Dachau, Belzec, Treblinka, Chelmo, Sobibor and more smaller subcamps elsewhere.
Between one and two million people died at Auschwitz-Birkenau. In the space of around two years. About 183 people managed to escape successfully (one enterprising group stole SS guards uniforms and then drove off in the camp commandant's car...).
We had more prayers: the rabbi sang El Molei Rachamim, and then we said the 23rd Psalm, and Kaddish. Around a hundred voices saying Kaddish. All at different speeds, this amazing sursurrection of sound. I teared up again, and mumbled Hail Mary. It seemed terribly inadequate.
And then, we walked out of that camp. We walked along that railway that so many people had been carried in upon, to their deaths. We walked all the way up to the gates, because we could.
Like I said. I am unutterably lucky. Before I went, I hadn't quite managed to grasp the scale, or the temperatures. The physicality of it was beyond me: but, much of what I read on the notice boards posted around the sites was distressingly familiar. I've read so much: ever since I first read Anne Frank. I've read about Mischlings, I've read Anne Frank's Stepsister's Autobiography. Schindler's List, the testamonies of the survivors of the ghettos. I didn't read Eichmann in Vienna. I should have.
But the scale of it. How do you imagine 6 million? It's like September 11th happening every day for four years.... That's the scale.
Photos
After it got dark, we visited a Synagogue in Krakow (one of the only two Synagogues left in Poland. There were 6000 before the war): and we whizzed past Oskar Schindler's Factory. Shot through a museum, where we just didn't have enough time. Bundled onto the plane. And were reminded to live our lives, as well as remember (Yad Vashem want to ensure that every victim of the Holocaust is remembered: email guardianofthememory at yadvashem.org.uk).
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