Auschwitz - To Poland with empathy
Throughout my Poland trip my opinion of this country has varied. It is not an easy country, and coming from a very blessed life in the United States, this trip has been eye opening. But nothing prepared me for Auschwitz. I assumed I would cry, I assumed I would feel sad, and I assumed it would be hard to see some of the sights.
It wasn't sad it was devastating, I cried but I also felt nauseated, and it wasn't hard to see, there were some things I could not bare to see more of. I walked under the sign Arbeit macht frei at around 8am on the 13 degree F windy Sunday morning. It means work sets you free and Auschwitz was designed as a prison work camp. There are two parts to the camp, Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II- Birkenau. Birkenau dropped the illusions of a prison work camp and was almost exclusively an execution camp. It was massive. These camps are 40 square kilometers. There were dorm like buildings that housed about 1000 people, but could comfortably home maybe 20 people. The people were shoved in to die on top of each other.
What struck me the most was all of the windows in A-I. The buildings were nice brick buildings with windows. The windows were just so insulting. On the one hand it could have given the prisoners a vision of hope and escape for beyond the windows maybe 20 feet was a simple barbed wire fence. I am sure it must have been difficult to reach the fence without being shot or caught because people certainly tried. Those who tried to escape were threatened with the imprisonment and execution of their families if they tried. In all of the 1.3 million people, only a few hundred ever escaped. Not even a tenth of a single percent made it out of there via escape and that was with all the aide and support of the surrounding Polish people. These windows felt like psychological war.
I can't imagine their horror of seeing and hearing train loads of people coming in everyday to Birkenau (the train stop) and never seeing those people again. It's hard to not tell the history that is easily found on the internet. And that is why the museum was so hard. I know the Jewish people were executed in mass, but seeing where it took place made it feel so much more real. Seeing the gas chamber blocked off after being rebuilt and reading that right there in that spot every single day for years train loads of people came in, often "unsorted" meaning no survivors and they were gassed under the guise of taking a shower. They were stripped naked, heads shaved, and shoved in so compact as to make the gas chamber more effective and killed. (It killed quicker because they lose oxygen more if more people are breathing it in the chamber.) 6000 people per day. The number is just unbelievable and its a chamber the size of a trailer. And the Germans were so clever with it. They built it so effectively hiding it underground then destroying it at the end of the war in hopes they wouldn't have to be accountable for their crimes. And of the officers there, only 12% were ever charged. And typing this all out it just makes me enraged and angry and sad. There were no windows in the chamber. Just a tiled sealed rectangle.
I saw a room full of hair. Tons of hair weighed out that was stolen from those waiting to be executed. Braids of women young and old cut off. Shoes, pretty red shoes, and nice leather dress shoes worn by people who had lives, who had families, who had jobs. These were humans who had hopes and ambitions and talents. I saw some of their art and heard their writing and it was wonderful. One artist had the foresight to write in a diary she expected to be taken and killed so she hid her art and said she donates it to the Jewish people in the future who will inevitably build a museum to honor the culture of those destroyed. And clearly she was right, but she also knew there was a future for the Jews. Hearing her hope made me appreciate the windows. It was hell for them inside of those camps, even if they only lived long enough to get off of a train. It felt like hell to just walk through. Every picture of a child that I saw I got teared up. Leopold Minz, maybe four years old, taken from his ghetto on the 15th, killed at Birkenau on the 17th. Every time I saw another person walking through the somber environment crying, I cried too. At the shooting wall it was so cold that the water particles in the air hung like shining diamonds. Behind the wall stood the flag of Israel along with flowers. The memory is not gone. The windows weren't giving them hope for that life, the windows were giving them hope for those who would be free to live their lives after them. So many of the Jewish people had given up the hope for their own lives, but not for the future of others. They dealt with hell in the hopes that one day others would not.
This is already far wordier than most of my writing and it hasn't even said much. And I think this is one of those situations where all the words in the world cannot describe the feeling of emptiness that is there. It is like a dementor (Harry Potter) hangs over the spots where the Germans lived in the camps sucking all the brightness away. Whereas in the prisoners area a feeling of nothingness. It felt like an utter void of life.
It didn't feel haunted to me. Now I don't know that I would know what that felt like to begin with but I do get creeped out easily. And walking through many of the buildings, aside from sadness, I just felt the nothingness void. Like a vacuum had sucked all the life of out the place. Alone in the woods you still feel the forest breathing. Alone in these buildings I just felt space. I thought it would be too much of an injustice for a person to die in Auschwitz and for their spirit to remain there. Their earthly lives were horror, their lives in the next world would be far from this empty space. The one building I could not get through was where the German commanders lived. It looked closed at first. I gripped the handle and I initially thought the door was locked. But it moved open. I took a few steps in and it felt tight sharp and heavy inside. The door blew shut, somehow the wind, with no other doors or windows opened sucked the door closed. I immediately turned and left without looking. If anyone haunts that place, I imagine it is the ones who did the killings, not the ones killed.
What also struck me was how average everything looked. Normal brick buildings with plaques that read "in this room a doctor would kill 12 boys per day with lethal injection into the heart." "In this basement there was the first gas chamber." The gas chambers were built so the Nazi "Yes Men" didn't have to shoot the prisoners and feel badly about killing someone at such close range. There were no windows into the chamber. Everything being so normal made it feel so much worse.
I know you can't understand a situation fully until you have lived through it and many of the Nazi's had either the choice to join or die and that is what makes this worse. Yes some of the people who worked these camps were probably mentally insane and evil, but many were probably just average people.
It started when the German economy was doing poorly. Hitler came along and rallied the people to get their spirits up about fixing their economy to be prosperous once again. In order to do that they needed to get rid of the Jews who were doing well economically (supposedly) and the scapegoat for the failing German economy. These outsiders had come in and they were "stealing" resources from the native population. It was all politics and a seed of hate that grew into a monster tree. Slowly convincing one group that another one had wronged them. And it's insane that people followed, but I am not surprised because people do everything in their power to avoid their own responsibility and accountability.
Recently there was a shooting in Florida where a man killed 17 people because he was angry. People are talking about how he was mentally unstable and "the system" failed him. His parents had died which is understandably very traumatic. But he also had the police called on him many (38) times, therapy didn't stick with him, he would burst out in anger and threaten people. And we blame his mental instability so we can seemingly choose to ignore that normal people can be heinous and evil to one another. We write these cases off in the hopes of separating ourselves as normal and sometimes evil people as a mental issue that we certainly couldn't possess.
People can be evil though and still normal. Look at Auschwitz. You can't explain every action as evil to remove all responsibility from yourself. Our society clings to the "non-apology." Oh I am sorry you were offended, I am sorry you took my action the wrong way; we over explain why we did the bad thing we did. We try to explain away our guilt and our wrongness. Our dickishness is not because we are dicks, it was because of the situation. I was stressed, I was hungry, it wasn't the "real" me.
But it is.
And the more we deny that the real "me's" can be heinous and evil and do horrible things without cause then the farther into a dark oblivion we will go. The more our seeds of hate can grow and satisfy us that we were and almost are always in the right. Additionally the more we group people together and assign them a fault while removing their humanity, the closer and closer we get to Hitler citing the Jewish people as the cause of the failing German economy. It sounds vaguely familiar to the Mexicans are stealing our jobs. Hitler and the Holocaust did not happen overnight. It was two decades from his political start to 6,000 people being gassed a day in a windowless room the size of a trailer.
Normal people can do heinous acts. Evil can be part of a normal person. We must first acknowledge we can be capable of terrible things and then combat this side of ourselves. We must treat each other with love, stomp out flames of our hate while also owning we have a hateful side, and protect the people who are being wrongly held accountable for our own sins, our own hate, our own failures, our own lagging successes, and our own poor self esteem. We dwell on our own failures and choose to blame others instead of embracing that we alone can do and accomplish very little.
I thought about all those people killed in Auschwitz and throughout the war from victims of the camps to the soldiers trying to end the SS. The art I saw, the kids eyes, the handsome and beautiful people in the pictures old and young alike, the excerpts of writing, all doing normal things. What could our world have been if they were around to make it a richer place? What innovations would we have, what sort of books, what sort of traditions? All that is lost and now we just must learn from it.
Despite the tragic visit it felt good. It felt good for my soul to recognize how wrong each one of can be, even if our biggest sin is remaining silent. It felt good hearing in this tragic place the Jewish groups of visitors breaking out into song together. It felt good to cry for lives that never got to live, because everyone of those people who went through the prison camp experience deserves to be remembered.
There is a book called Atonement where a little girls' lie causes the death of her sister and the sisters boyfriend. She writes a book giving the sister and the boyfriend the happy ending that they never got to have in real life. That is how I got through seeing the pictures of all those people. I have to imagine they have a happy ending, not in this life but certainly the next beyond their windows.
When I got back to Warsaw and just tried to absorb everything my mind would not stop dwelling on what I had seen. I deleted many of the pictures I took because it felt like I was stealing something that should remain there to be respected. I watched Youtube videos of survivors and read more on the history trying to feel less askew inside. But it didn't happen. Auschwitz is a place that should change you, at least until your mind blots it out for its own sanity. I didn't feel as vain or self involved the rest of the night. I am so blessed. And I am so blessed to be able to go to that place and acknowledge those people and my own hate inside so I can work to end it and be silent no more.
.
It wasn't sad it was devastating, I cried but I also felt nauseated, and it wasn't hard to see, there were some things I could not bare to see more of. I walked under the sign Arbeit macht frei at around 8am on the 13 degree F windy Sunday morning. It means work sets you free and Auschwitz was designed as a prison work camp. There are two parts to the camp, Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II- Birkenau. Birkenau dropped the illusions of a prison work camp and was almost exclusively an execution camp. It was massive. These camps are 40 square kilometers. There were dorm like buildings that housed about 1000 people, but could comfortably home maybe 20 people. The people were shoved in to die on top of each other.
What struck me the most was all of the windows in A-I. The buildings were nice brick buildings with windows. The windows were just so insulting. On the one hand it could have given the prisoners a vision of hope and escape for beyond the windows maybe 20 feet was a simple barbed wire fence. I am sure it must have been difficult to reach the fence without being shot or caught because people certainly tried. Those who tried to escape were threatened with the imprisonment and execution of their families if they tried. In all of the 1.3 million people, only a few hundred ever escaped. Not even a tenth of a single percent made it out of there via escape and that was with all the aide and support of the surrounding Polish people. These windows felt like psychological war.
I can't imagine their horror of seeing and hearing train loads of people coming in everyday to Birkenau (the train stop) and never seeing those people again. It's hard to not tell the history that is easily found on the internet. And that is why the museum was so hard. I know the Jewish people were executed in mass, but seeing where it took place made it feel so much more real. Seeing the gas chamber blocked off after being rebuilt and reading that right there in that spot every single day for years train loads of people came in, often "unsorted" meaning no survivors and they were gassed under the guise of taking a shower. They were stripped naked, heads shaved, and shoved in so compact as to make the gas chamber more effective and killed. (It killed quicker because they lose oxygen more if more people are breathing it in the chamber.) 6000 people per day. The number is just unbelievable and its a chamber the size of a trailer. And the Germans were so clever with it. They built it so effectively hiding it underground then destroying it at the end of the war in hopes they wouldn't have to be accountable for their crimes. And of the officers there, only 12% were ever charged. And typing this all out it just makes me enraged and angry and sad. There were no windows in the chamber. Just a tiled sealed rectangle.
I saw a room full of hair. Tons of hair weighed out that was stolen from those waiting to be executed. Braids of women young and old cut off. Shoes, pretty red shoes, and nice leather dress shoes worn by people who had lives, who had families, who had jobs. These were humans who had hopes and ambitions and talents. I saw some of their art and heard their writing and it was wonderful. One artist had the foresight to write in a diary she expected to be taken and killed so she hid her art and said she donates it to the Jewish people in the future who will inevitably build a museum to honor the culture of those destroyed. And clearly she was right, but she also knew there was a future for the Jews. Hearing her hope made me appreciate the windows. It was hell for them inside of those camps, even if they only lived long enough to get off of a train. It felt like hell to just walk through. Every picture of a child that I saw I got teared up. Leopold Minz, maybe four years old, taken from his ghetto on the 15th, killed at Birkenau on the 17th. Every time I saw another person walking through the somber environment crying, I cried too. At the shooting wall it was so cold that the water particles in the air hung like shining diamonds. Behind the wall stood the flag of Israel along with flowers. The memory is not gone. The windows weren't giving them hope for that life, the windows were giving them hope for those who would be free to live their lives after them. So many of the Jewish people had given up the hope for their own lives, but not for the future of others. They dealt with hell in the hopes that one day others would not.
This is already far wordier than most of my writing and it hasn't even said much. And I think this is one of those situations where all the words in the world cannot describe the feeling of emptiness that is there. It is like a dementor (Harry Potter) hangs over the spots where the Germans lived in the camps sucking all the brightness away. Whereas in the prisoners area a feeling of nothingness. It felt like an utter void of life.
It didn't feel haunted to me. Now I don't know that I would know what that felt like to begin with but I do get creeped out easily. And walking through many of the buildings, aside from sadness, I just felt the nothingness void. Like a vacuum had sucked all the life of out the place. Alone in the woods you still feel the forest breathing. Alone in these buildings I just felt space. I thought it would be too much of an injustice for a person to die in Auschwitz and for their spirit to remain there. Their earthly lives were horror, their lives in the next world would be far from this empty space. The one building I could not get through was where the German commanders lived. It looked closed at first. I gripped the handle and I initially thought the door was locked. But it moved open. I took a few steps in and it felt tight sharp and heavy inside. The door blew shut, somehow the wind, with no other doors or windows opened sucked the door closed. I immediately turned and left without looking. If anyone haunts that place, I imagine it is the ones who did the killings, not the ones killed.
What also struck me was how average everything looked. Normal brick buildings with plaques that read "in this room a doctor would kill 12 boys per day with lethal injection into the heart." "In this basement there was the first gas chamber." The gas chambers were built so the Nazi "Yes Men" didn't have to shoot the prisoners and feel badly about killing someone at such close range. There were no windows into the chamber. Everything being so normal made it feel so much worse.
I know you can't understand a situation fully until you have lived through it and many of the Nazi's had either the choice to join or die and that is what makes this worse. Yes some of the people who worked these camps were probably mentally insane and evil, but many were probably just average people.
It started when the German economy was doing poorly. Hitler came along and rallied the people to get their spirits up about fixing their economy to be prosperous once again. In order to do that they needed to get rid of the Jews who were doing well economically (supposedly) and the scapegoat for the failing German economy. These outsiders had come in and they were "stealing" resources from the native population. It was all politics and a seed of hate that grew into a monster tree. Slowly convincing one group that another one had wronged them. And it's insane that people followed, but I am not surprised because people do everything in their power to avoid their own responsibility and accountability.
Recently there was a shooting in Florida where a man killed 17 people because he was angry. People are talking about how he was mentally unstable and "the system" failed him. His parents had died which is understandably very traumatic. But he also had the police called on him many (38) times, therapy didn't stick with him, he would burst out in anger and threaten people. And we blame his mental instability so we can seemingly choose to ignore that normal people can be heinous and evil to one another. We write these cases off in the hopes of separating ourselves as normal and sometimes evil people as a mental issue that we certainly couldn't possess.
People can be evil though and still normal. Look at Auschwitz. You can't explain every action as evil to remove all responsibility from yourself. Our society clings to the "non-apology." Oh I am sorry you were offended, I am sorry you took my action the wrong way; we over explain why we did the bad thing we did. We try to explain away our guilt and our wrongness. Our dickishness is not because we are dicks, it was because of the situation. I was stressed, I was hungry, it wasn't the "real" me.
But it is.
And the more we deny that the real "me's" can be heinous and evil and do horrible things without cause then the farther into a dark oblivion we will go. The more our seeds of hate can grow and satisfy us that we were and almost are always in the right. Additionally the more we group people together and assign them a fault while removing their humanity, the closer and closer we get to Hitler citing the Jewish people as the cause of the failing German economy. It sounds vaguely familiar to the Mexicans are stealing our jobs. Hitler and the Holocaust did not happen overnight. It was two decades from his political start to 6,000 people being gassed a day in a windowless room the size of a trailer.
Normal people can do heinous acts. Evil can be part of a normal person. We must first acknowledge we can be capable of terrible things and then combat this side of ourselves. We must treat each other with love, stomp out flames of our hate while also owning we have a hateful side, and protect the people who are being wrongly held accountable for our own sins, our own hate, our own failures, our own lagging successes, and our own poor self esteem. We dwell on our own failures and choose to blame others instead of embracing that we alone can do and accomplish very little.
I thought about all those people killed in Auschwitz and throughout the war from victims of the camps to the soldiers trying to end the SS. The art I saw, the kids eyes, the handsome and beautiful people in the pictures old and young alike, the excerpts of writing, all doing normal things. What could our world have been if they were around to make it a richer place? What innovations would we have, what sort of books, what sort of traditions? All that is lost and now we just must learn from it.
Despite the tragic visit it felt good. It felt good for my soul to recognize how wrong each one of can be, even if our biggest sin is remaining silent. It felt good hearing in this tragic place the Jewish groups of visitors breaking out into song together. It felt good to cry for lives that never got to live, because everyone of those people who went through the prison camp experience deserves to be remembered.
There is a book called Atonement where a little girls' lie causes the death of her sister and the sisters boyfriend. She writes a book giving the sister and the boyfriend the happy ending that they never got to have in real life. That is how I got through seeing the pictures of all those people. I have to imagine they have a happy ending, not in this life but certainly the next beyond their windows.
When I got back to Warsaw and just tried to absorb everything my mind would not stop dwelling on what I had seen. I deleted many of the pictures I took because it felt like I was stealing something that should remain there to be respected. I watched Youtube videos of survivors and read more on the history trying to feel less askew inside. But it didn't happen. Auschwitz is a place that should change you, at least until your mind blots it out for its own sanity. I didn't feel as vain or self involved the rest of the night. I am so blessed. And I am so blessed to be able to go to that place and acknowledge those people and my own hate inside so I can work to end it and be silent no more.
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| This was in the hall honoring the Belgium's who went to A-II to die. Happy couples on ski holidays, families, little boys on the beach |
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| The average-ness of the brick buildings and sandy path and the simple barbed wire fences. |
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| And the plaques stating what happened within the buildings. |
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| Work Sets you Free (lies) |
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Block 11, known for its torturing to death cells. Death by starvation, dark rooms with limited oxygen, rooms where you could not sit or lie down.
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