lisa_goldstein | Entries tagged with auschwitz

After lunch we drive on to Birkenau, which is much larger, a place the Nazis built when they ran out of room at Auschwitz. We go up the infamous guard tower and see the camp laid out in front of us, and we check the legend to try to figure out where my mother might have been.

There are barracks where Hungarian women were put in 1944, but my brother and I both remember that our mother had talked about seeing Gypsies on the other side of a fence (we didn’t know the word “Roma” then), and the barracks for Roma prisoners are nowhere near there. (My brother doesn’t remember that she also said that one day she woke up to find that they were all gone, taken away and murdered.) We tell the guide about our discoveries and he says, sounding almost testy, “Well, of course I know where she was,” as if we had doubted his professional expertise.

He leads us to the barracks for Hungarian women, which is the place he was thinking of. The buildings were made out of wood so they’re mostly gone, just the foundations and brick chimneys still standing.

They’re very close to where the selections were made, a place represented by a railroad car...

and that’s just a walk down a road to the gas chambers. We head down the road, and my brother says, “This is the last walk our grandparents ever took.” I’ve become numb by this time, overwhelmed, but at this I start shivering again. The Germans tried to dynamite the gas chambers, but the only thing that happened was that the roofs cratered in, and the buildings are mostly still there.

We see several groups besides tourists at Birkenau. One of them is an assembly of Jews, some of them literally draped in the Israeli flag, who seem to be praying at various sites and singing “Ha-Tikvah,” the Israeli national anthem. Someone in our group says later that it was good to hear that song in that place, but I wonder if you can oppose one form of nationalism with another. And we see soldiers, part of the Polish army our guide tells us, and this I approve of wholeheartedly. Every army in the world should come here.

At the end our guide thanks me for sharing my mother’s story with him, and I feel relieved -- I’d thought I was bugging the hell out of him. (“But my mother didn’t have a tattoo.”) It’s possible he’s just being polite, though.

Like I said, I don’t have any words to sum up the experience. Instead I’ll quote someone far more knowledgable and wiser than I am, Primo Levi. There’s a quote from him on one of the walls in the museum: “It happened, therefore it can happen again: this is the core of what we have to say. It can happen, and it can happen everywhere.”

If I took anything away from Auschwitz it was this. There are the Poles who refuse to come to terms with their past; the Hungarians who seem to be trying to wall off their entire country to keep immigrants out; the rise of far-right parties in other places around the world. And of course the United States, with some ICE officials who wouldn’t look out of place making selections at Auschwitz, tearing children from their parents’ arms.

One of the reasons I put off doing a post about Auschwitz was that I had nothing new to say, no original thoughts to share, and I thought that if I waited I’d come up with something. Now I realize that that isn’t going to happen, that there are no easy conclusions to draw from my visit. All I can give you is a series of disconnected images, along with some scattered thoughts and feelings about them.

I knew very little about Auschwitz before I went to see it. My mother had been a prisoner there and then had worked in several forced labor camps; she’d told me about her experiences, of course, but that had been a first-person account without any sense of the larger history. And, I think, I didn’t want to know any more, didn’t want to think of her (or anyone) suffering in that way. For a while I even thought of not going on the tour with the rest of the group, of staying in Krakow and doing more touristy stuff. In the end, though, I realized that I’d regret it if I didn’t go, and so, when our driver and guide came to pick us up at 8, I was standing out in front with everyone else.

The driver takes us up into the hills to the town of Oswiecim. The land is pretty much agricultural, with fields and small towns and woods and meadows. Our guide says that most of the Poles here had been displaced by Germans during the war, and that of course everyone knew what was happening, that they could smell a terrible odor coming from the camp and complained that there was so much ash in the river their kids couldn’t go swimming.

I liked our guide, but this turns out to be a recurring theme of his -- the Poles weren’t to blame for anything, it was all the Germans. When we’re driving back we ask him, carefully, about the new Polish law that makes it a crime to say that Poles built the concentration camps, and he says that he disapproves of censorship but understands why the law was put into effect, because of all the references to “Polish death camps.” But they were Polish death camps, I think, death camps in Poland, built by Poles. Still, I don’t argue with him, and no one else does either.

(Despite the fact that I ended up having a few more disagreements with him, I do want to say he did a good job as a guide. So I’m not giving his name here, because I don’t want anyone looking him up and then deciding not to hire him.)

My brother and I tell the guide that our mother was in Auschwitz, and he asks when she got there, and we say 1944, from Hungary. He says she was lucky, then seems to read something in my expression and explains what he meant -- that near the end of the war they’d stopped doing a lot of the selections and were just sending everyone to the gas chambers, and also that having to work kept her from being killed. It’s a strange definition of lucky, but I know what he means.

I’d heard a long time ago that the Poles were letting the camp decay back into the ground, that they wanted to let it go and forget about it. When we get there, though, I see that nothing could be further from the truth. Everything’s almost the same as it was except for the wooden buildings, which disintegrated, and the places the Germans managed to destroy before they left.

Our guide is, as I said, very good, knowledgeable and professional. He speaks in a low soft voice into a microphone, which we hear through our earbuds. (You’re supposed to respect the place by being silent, or as silent as you can.) We start at the buildings in Auschwitz that have been turned into a museum, displaying belongings that were taken from the prisoners, suitcases, clothing, mountains of hair, a barbed-wire pile of steel-framed glasses.

I alternate between shivering in horror and feeling nauseated, thinking about all the people who had been murdered here. We hear the speeches of some of the more deranged Nazis, and then in the next room the testimonies of people who’d survived. I’m fascinated by this, and the others seem to be too, and we sit and listen as a woman talks about the Warsaw uprising, how she killed a soldier and felt at first as if she’d committed a crime and then proud to have done it.

The guide urges us on gently, saying that there’s a lot more and that the testimonies go on for an hour before repeating. We come to a room with giant books containing the names of four million victims -- two million were never recorded or have been forgotten. I look for my father’s father, who’s there, and so are my mother’s parents, and someone with the name and town of one of my mother’s sisters — the only one of the five to have been killed in a camp — but with the wrong year of birth. It could be her or someone else — it’s a common name.

By this time it’s around 1 o’clock, and we break for lunch. Yes, there’s a cafeteria at Auschwitz, and going there is so surreal it’s almost an out-of-body experience. Here I am, a few miles away from where my mother had nearly starved to death, sating my very mild hunger with pizza, a food she had probably never heard of then.

And I think I’ll stop there for now, with that mix of horror and unreality that pretty much sums up a lot of what I felt there.

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
			1	2	3	4
5	6	7	8	9	10	11
12	13	14	15	16	17	18
19	20	21	22	23	24	25
26	27	28	29	30	31

You Have To Wonder

Entries tagged with auschwitz

Navigation

Visit to Auschwitz 2

Visit to Auschwitz 1

Profile

January 2025

Syndicate

Most Popular Tags

Page Summary

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags