When I say that everyone of my generation should visit Auschwitz, what I really mean is that everyone should have the opportunity to visit a facility like Auschwitz or a site of genocide; be it another Nazi concentration or extermination camp such as Belzec or Treblinka, the Killing Fields in Cambodia, or Kigali in Rwanda. Why? Well there are countless reasons ranging from education to remembrance but, ultimately, it is to put things into perspective. A phrase, a thought-process I frequently use is “it’s all relative". Often, yes, it is all relative, and comparing your own circumstances or predicaments to others’ would be a futile exercise. However, there are occasions when saying “it’s all relative” is simply a cop-out.
As I write this, I am suffering from a cold. It’s a bitch of a cold – my head hurts, my throat is on fire, and I’m fairly sure my eyeballs are about to burst out of their sockets and shatter the computer screen. And yes, I could easily argue that “it’s all relative” because it would be pointless to compare my cold to, say, having chemicals injected into my uterus to glue it shut, because you can’t compare a cold to that, and because I feel freaking miserable. But that’s just it – my cold isn’tan excruciating sterilization experiment, and while I may feel poorly because of it, it isn’t causing me agonizing pain and increasing the chances of a premature death. Still, I’m going to continue to feel sorry for myself, and I’m going to continue to Tweet requests for flowers (which people are going to continue to ignore), because I have a horrible cold which is making me feel like shit… and it’s all relative, right? Wrong. Or, at least, I think it is wrong. Myself and people my age have had it easy. We whinge and moan when we can’t get 3G connectivity, or we have a 9.00am lecture at uni. I say “we” – you know you’ve done it. At least once. And that’s because for our generation, these are things to moan about. And this makes us incredibly fortunate. And this is why we should all have our comfortable, undemanding, blessed lives put into perspective so we can properly appreciate them.
People might disagree with me on this notion. Whatever, it’s a personal opinion. I also imagine there are people who would question why I would look so far afield when, in Australia we had the degradation and eventual destruction of an entire race through the genocide of Australian Aborigines. I have several answers to this, many of which would probably showcase my naivety and ignorance of Australian history, but the most relevant response is that Nazi-occupied Europe is my heritage. Auschwitz is somewhere I have felt the need to visit for a long time. As I imagine is the case with many people whose family survived World War II and the Nazi-occupation, I have for a long time felt an obligation of sorts to go to Auschwitz. Whether this “connection” informed my experience in any way, I do not know, but it is the reason I found myself there, and it certainly caused many a pause for reflection.
I’m not going to make this a fact-filled essay, but a little bit of background for those who don’t know...
Auschwitz, the German name for the Polish town Oświęcim, is about 70km from Kraków. Auschwitz was originally built as a Polish army barracks, and the camp at Auschwitz was initially established in 1940 to house Poles who had been arrested by the Nazis after the invasion in 1939. However, by 1942 it had been developed and extended into an enormous complex of camps, three on or very near the main site - Auschwitz I, II (Birkenau), and III (Monowitz) - and a further 35 sub-camps. No exact death toll is known, but estimates put the deaths at somewhere between 1.1 and 1.5 million people, most of whom were deliberately, methodically gassed to death and then incinerated.
We took a tour from Kraków because, during the summer months, you must be part of a tour group to gain admittance to the site (whereas in the quieter winter months people are able to wander the site on their own). The bus trip took around an hour and a half, during which they played the same film which is screened at Auschwitz for visitors. A combination of footage from the camp and footage filmed in the first moments after its liberation, the harrowing images certainly set the tone for the visit. We first arrived at Auschwitz I, the original camp, which housed prisoners, was the location of medical experiments and is the site of Block 11 (a place of extreme torture) and the Black Wall (a place of execution).
The day we went was incredibly hot, sunny and slightly breezy – essentially the perfect summer's day. Honestly, my initial impressions were that it was really quite picturesque, beautiful even. That I could even think that probably sounds exceedingly sick and depraved, but the initial moments didn’t present to me anything like what I had been expecting. Considering how harrowing the experience did become, I am grateful that I did visit there on the day I did, in the conditions I did, but I do sometimes wonder how the experience would have been if I had gone in the dead of winter, with snow and a biting wind. I daresay it would have been very different. Despite these first impressions, walking under the “Arbeit macht frei” sign sent shivers down my spine.
Auschwitz I is almost perfectly preserved, and what little restoration work has been done is very clearly labelled. The site functions fundamentally as a museum and as well as the aforementioned Block 11 and Black Wall, you will see the following very literal sites: the electrified fence, the roll-call square, crematorium and gas chamber. As well as these there is the permanent exhibition which includes, amongst many things, photographs, documents, prisoner garments, prisoner bunks and items seized from prisoners. Our tour group was led by a man who would have been about my age. He led us through the camp and through the many rooms of the exhibition at a very rapid pace, all the time firing off statistics and numbers relating to the camp’s operation. He was incredibly clinical in his delivery (which I imagine you would have to be in order to do that job), but the hurried, detached nature in which he reeled off information, coupled with the sheer scale of the exhibits we were seeing, made it all that much harder to process. You would think that being confronted with seven tonnes of human hair which had been cut off the corpses of women in the gas chambers (and was to be used for things such as being turned into socks worn by Nazi soldiers) would elicit a barrage of emotions, but it didn’t provoke much of a response from me at all – at the time, that is.
When we visited the Holocaust museum in Berlin, I was incredibly emotional, and I had expected to feel even more emotional at Auschwitz. And yet, all I really felt was numb. A quote which is usually misattributed to Stalin – to the point I am actually unsure as to whose words they are – probably best sums up how I was initially feeling: ‘The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic.’ It’s a controversial yet fascinating quote I had always considered merely another example of such dictators’ batshit lunacy, but I find myself almost agreeing with it now – not as a demission of large-scale death, but as an accurate observation of a person’s inability to comprehend that level of loss and destruction.
The tour then took us to Auschwitz II, or Birkenau, which is about three kms away. I had done a lot of reading on Auschwitz over the years, seen a lot of photos, and I always knew that Birkenau was big, but I was absolutely stunned by the sheer size of it. Birkenau was the real “killing centre” of the Auschwitz camp, and it was here the infamous “selections” took place as people arrived into the camp by train. Almost three quarters of prisoners were executed upon arrival at Birkenau, and to stand by those train tracks was another of those truly harrowing moments.
Unlike Auschwitz I, Birkenau was mostly destroyed by the SS in the days leading up to the arrival of Soviet forces. A few of the original barracks survived, and original materials were used to reconstruct a few more, however mostly it is a 425-acre grave site. I found Birkenau a lot more confronting than Auschwitz I. In a way I cannot explain, from the moment we stepped through the entrance, I felt as if fear, powerlessness, pain, suffering and sadness were all palpable; I genuinely felt as if I was surrounded by death.
We were taken to a few of the barracks and to the ramp where the selections took place, but otherwise we were free to wander around on our own. I cannot tell you how long we were there as I had no sense of time whatsoever. In the same way I was at Auschwitz I, I was momentarily taken by the – and I hesitate to say it – beauty of the greenery. And yet, it didn’t take long for me to look past the green grass and the flowers, and see the crematorium and realise that it was ash from the bodies burnt in there which had fertilised the grass and made it so green. A realisation which left me feeling nauseous and yet, strangely, faintly heartened.
The whole way back on the bus to Kraków, I slept. That night, and even the next day I still felt quite numb towards the entire experience, but eventually I started to feel troubled and even distraught, in a way I expected to from the outset. To this day, the images still play on my mind. It is one thing to learn about what happened, but I don’t think you can truly appreciate the atrocities from simply reading about it in a book or watching a documentary. The horror can never be entirely conveyed, but Auschwitz stands as a chilling monument to human idiocy, malevolence and senselessness, and it will stay with me for as long as I live.
