Remnants

I’ve neglected my travel blog for some time. It’s not that I haven’t had any notable thoughts or experiences to share, but I seemed to have created a psychological log jam about writing this particular piece simply because the theme is so challenging, and I didn’t feel like writing much else until I’d dealt with it. There is, of course, the choice of silence, but I prefer the choice of subjective disclosure, however imperfect or inarticulate. Besides, the key to breaking the block has been a small but significant family revelation.

My older sister recently recalled sneaking downstairs one night, just a few years after the end of the Second World War, to spy on our father who was sitting, sobbing over a large, heavy book. He was also holding a gun. He wasn’t a man who found it easy to show his feelings, so this was clearly disturbing behaviour. The next day when he had gone out, she went to his study and pulled out the book he had been looking at. It was an album of photographs of concentration camp victims.

My parents brought me up on the horrors of the concentration camps and the belief that my father’s role as a young bomber pilot during the war had made some small contribution to putting an end to such evil. Iconic black and white photographs of “Arbeit Macht Frei” and railway sidings etched in iron and snow were also part of my childhood arsenal of memories. Jewish friends of the family told of escaping from Nazi Europe with nothing but a good education and the clothes they stood up in. As a result, my parents’ belief that knowledge, not money, would extricate me from future predicaments, shaped my upbringing.

Eighteen months ago, I visited Auschwitz-Birkenau for the first time. I had travelled to Warsaw from Lithuania and spent a late night following the ghetto trail to its final resting place in the quiet streets adjacent to a grim-looking housing estate. A tram hummed in the distance as I stood silently at the white cattle-truck monument of the Umschlagplatz, from where Jews had been transported to Treblinka. The following morning, I took the comfortable intercity to Krakow and chose to spend a day visiting Nazi Germany’s largest and most infamous concentration camp, Auschwitz. I wanted to see the symbol of the ideology that ripped Europe apart.

I wrote down in Polish the instructions for a return ticket to Oświęcim, before climbing on board a stolid, shabby old train to settle into red plastic seats for the two-hour journey. A group of laughing teenagers played with their mobile phones, their voices becoming almost imperceptibly subdued as the dull, dry countryside slipped by.

The guide books informed me that Auschwitz-Birkenau would be unfathomably shocking, horrific. That was bound to be the case, but I didn’t want to buy into a bequest of words or be influenced by emotions that didn’t belong to me. It was too enormous for that and warranted truthful response, however uncomfortable or unexpected. The weight of history was heavy enough to generate certain expectations about what lay ahead but my raw responses would be the tightrope to be walked between shared experience and shared expectation.

I wanted to walk from the station instead of taking the bus, intending to visit the main Auschwitz camp first before moving on to Birkenau, a half hour walk away. The route, however, was badly signposted and I took several wrong turnings before finding myself walking along a narrow path adjacent to a row of cottages, at the end of which ran a railway. An elderly man was working in his garden, which backed onto a rough patch of grassland through which the lines cut and continued their iron stretch towards the south west and north east. A black cattletruck rested on the rails, negative twin to the one at Umschlagplatz.  Although morning, it was already hot, my shoulders were reddening and heat haze hovered above the uneven sleepers. I could hear no sound but the rhythmic nudge of hoe meeting dirt. I stopped to contemplate the railway, sensed a kernel of alarm on the back of my neck, and turned right to walk along the spur through the gap between houses. Then I saw it. The arched and turreted gate of Birkenau with the railway line curving through the scrub to meet it. I walked along the line, meadow flowers pushing through the cracks, and crossed the main road to stand in the photograph already embedded in my head. I could hear my heart beating.

The small, unobtrusive visitors section presented a list on the wall of the categories of undesirables who were incarcerated and exterminated here: Jews, Gypsies, Poles, communists, Catholics, Jehovah’s Witnesses and homosexuals, along with a request for silence and no food or drink as a mark of respect. Bar one or two people, and the now completely muted teenagers from the train, there was no one else around.

I began the long route around the edge of the camp, starting with the surviving wooden barracks that smelled of forest and pre-war primary school. Wilted floral tributes lay just inside the entrances. The heat was almost unbearable. The heat generated by four hundred people crammed into the bunks of each barrack must have been more so. I imagined the fierce scramble to access the window during the summer months and the fight, as bitter as the cold, for a middle bunk during the winter. Barrack after barrack after barrack of incarcerated bodies. I gave up trying to calculate the number of people that had been crammed into this small section alone.

I tried to outmanoeuvre a Polish family that trailed me around the huts, voices clattering in time to the camera shutter, slurping on coke, crunching on crisps, emitting a continuing drone of comment and camcorder. They had pasted over reverence with the essentials of a day trip. I questioned my own intolerance, bearing in mind the scarcity of visitors even at this peak holiday time. The search for knowledge should always supersede reverence, for reverence is often a blind, empty ritual. But I’m old fashioned enough to prefer to mark my respect with small acts of self-discipline. I cleared my mental tutting and moved on.

Regaining a pocket of silence, I cut through the gates to the main aisles that ran between barrack sections, the walls long gone, marked out on the ground like the remains of a camp site or cricket pitch. The Angelus rang out from the nearby Church of Divine Mercy, its tones well-meaning but sounding like mockery.

There are many myths surrounding this place, one of which is that the birds do not sing here. That is complete nonsense. Beautiful birds of every hue and song are abundant. As I stood in silence, the “men’s barracks” (which struck me as a possible euphemism) on one side, the Gypsy camp on the other, one bird dive-bombed me. Screaming, it flew around and around my head, warning me away. She must have had a nest nearby. Out of the spiral of frenzy and fear arose my own choking breath as it caught a memory pattern and flew with its circular chant. A close relative had infiltrated my childhood with ignorance and racism, punctuated by the hate-filled mantra, “Hitler had the right idea, you know. Hitler had the right idea.” I swatted away this needlepoint, stuck under my skin like scurvy, an itch, a parasite. I walked away from this person years ago, but the voice remained. Shooing away the echoes in my head, as the bird screeched, “Hitler had the right idea”, I clenched my fists and shouted to the sky, “Hitler had the right idea? I dare you. I bloody dare you to stand where I am standing right now and repeat that phrase. Hitler had the right idea? Coward. I fucking dare you.”

Anger assuaged and the voice exorcised, the bird flew away. I moved on to the site where Mengele tortured his victims, and laid wild flowers nearby.

I rested from the heat of myself and the day in the calm and shade of a copse of oak, birch and beech. As I sat gazing at a pond, I realised it was croaking, and watched as hundreds of little green heads popped up between the lily pads and dived back down, leaving a dull plop and a ring of water. It was a fertile breeding ground for frogs, and I let out an involuntary laugh of delight at their antics. I suddenly caught sight of the sign to the right of the pond. The ashes of those exterminated in the nearby gas chambers had been dumped here. Laughter dissolved into the water as my thoughts turned cartwheels. Juxtaposition is everything and knowledge is its serpent, always biting at the heel of beauty. If I knew nothing of this place, if there were no barbed wire or barracks, I would think it a pretty site with its flowers, trees, and fairy cake Carpathians lining the horizon. Whatever shadow is cast across its geography by virtue of its history, there’s no denying that some beauty remains, because the richness of life remains. Nature cares not one jot what we do to each other and it will continue to thrive whether we exist or not. It was my first, genuinely sober thought of the day.

It was the trigger of the small things, though, that crushed me. A large glass box containing confiscated cutlery, combs, nick-nacks, the detritus of daily life brought me to my knees, sobbing. Sobbing because it was not the barracks or barbed wire or broken walls of the gas chambers, but a single fork, a piece of skewed metalwork, which had lasted longer than the human flesh that created it, which was the reminder that our bodies are more vulnerable and precious than the crap we leave behind. These irrelevant remnants highlighted the enormity of the monstrosity that was committed here. Another homily pronounces that to comprehend Auschwitz, it is best to imagine the suffering of a few people you know and love, not two million you don’t. I disagree. Try imagining a million people. Try to imagine two. All processed through this efficient killing machine, truckload after truckload after truckload, like mere handfuls of disposable dust.

Technology enhanced the Nazis’ ability to kill on a massive, impersonal scale. In a world that continues to engender atrocities, it was a blueprint for moral judgements based on the wedge that removes direct human contact from the equation.

In the face of this Behemoth, I stand in awe of those who stood up to the regime, or who cleverly and clandestinely did their bit to undermine it or help Jews and others to escape. It made me face hard questions about myself, about my ability to respond to oppression with truth and courage. What would I be willing to put on the line for the sake of a life? My job, my home, my family? My own life? For whom? What criteria do I use to value one life over another?

Auschwitz is a reminder that such atrocity is only ever a breath of an idea away, a construct of the darkest, most complicit part of ourselves. The people who built it were not monsters, they were human beings. They were our kin and they were supported by people just like us. And so it continues – complicity, overt and subtle, with the abhorrence of ‘other’. We have watched the Bosnian and Rwandan genocides, the BNP’s  membership continues to grow, and new-age conspiracy theories still dredge up the same anti-Semitic propaganda that the Nazis proliferated. In the meantime, staunchly Catholic Poland sits uneasily as guardian of this major World Heritage Site while homosexuals remain the only represented group of detainees to never have been invited to formal commemorations.

There are groups of people that are an uncomfortable fit within our field of ideals and interactions. We don’t understand them. We may not like them. So if they were one day rounded up for extermination, ask yourself – what would you do?

“I’ve been thinking lately about how you told me, years ago, that there were worthwhile people and others who weren’t so worthwhile, the ones who got insulin when they had diabetes, and the others who didn’t. And I agreed, fool that I was. Now they’ve invented new divisions and now I belong to the worthless group. It serves me right.”

The Jewish Wife from Fears and Miseries in the Third Reich by Berthold Brecht

“I don’t want to be considered a hero. Imagine young people would grow up with the feeling that you have to be a hero to do your human duty.”

Miep Gies

 

“People ask all the time what I learned in the camps. But the camps weren’t therapy. What do you think these places were? Universities? We didn’t go there to learn. … My advice, go to the theatre, if you want catharsis. Please. Go to literature. Don’t go to the camps. Nothing comes out of the camps. Nothing.”

Ilana in ‘The Reader’

 

First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a communist;
Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist;
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist;
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew;
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak out for me.

Martin Niemöller