Please forgive me for asking you to look directly at the horror of Auschwitz and Birkenau. I have needed the distance of time and place before I could write properly to you about them, but last night my dreams prompted me not to forget and pass on what we witnessed there. This may come out as fractured memories because sometimes I had to withdraw into myself and not think, but only listen, not process, but only record, so that the next part of the camp would not be lost to my memory.
We walked on the paths of Auschwitz and Birkenau, on the places where the earth is consecrated by the sacrifice and suffering of the people who lived, died, and survived there. All elements of the camps were meant to exterminate the prisoners. Those who were selected for the camp to be long-term prisoners often lasted only a few months, perhaps a few weeks, sometimes even days or hours. Later, when my friend Denise and I were discussing our experience, she said that as she looked at the rows of women, heads shaven so hurriedly and harshly that parts of their scalps were patchy and bare, she was caught by the date a group of women arrived, “It was my birthday.” Details like these connect you to the faces on the walls in ways that gripped our hearts.
The story was told in so many human ways, in ways that showed a landscape portrait of the volumes of people, mostly Jewish, but also Russian, Gypsy, and those suspected as being a part of the Polish resistance. In one building we were invited to go in and look at artistic renderings of the camp from prisoners who survived or escaped. As we looked at Nazi SS soldiers sadistically enjoying beating prisoners as they marched, we could see a cornered collection of young Jewish men gathered toward each other with bowed heads, each with one hand touching the other. From the center a young, strong, masculine voice called in English, “We are privileged. We are lucky. Never has a generation been as lucky as we are.” His voice resonated through us, as we imagined what this story might mean to someone who might find a picture of a relative on the wall.
Upstairs we could no longer hear voices. I was not prepared for the display, a glassed room the size of a swimming pool full of human hair. Looking at my feet, I heard our guide say that the hair was used to make fabrics for officers’collars and to make mattresses. I glanced up to see her point to a display where the use of human hair in the mattress was unmistakable. Singing in Hebrew echoed up the staircase, passing through us as we descended. Powerful and beautiful, even now I can hear their collective lament.
Other images linger—piles of rooms of shoes, twice in size of the previous building’s display, a mass of mostly neutral colors with specks of blue and red; then along the shelf, close, as we walked by, individual ones—sandals, business shoes, practical shoes, children’s shoes. And bunker-like shelters where people were invited to take a shower, where an adjoining area housed the ovens that gave this period its name, holocaust. Denise’s pictures are an attempt to catch some bit of color, some hint of hope against the stark gray gloom.
At Birkenau, the extreme living conditions of the prisoners became even clearer. Most of us have seen the film Schindler’s List, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, Counterfeiters, or other films that depict this time. When the wind kicks up it is hard not to imagine people herded from the trains, stripped of their clothes, before each other, before the guards. Later living in torn clothes in shelters, their bodies consume themselves. The first camp building in Birkenau was originally a barn built for fifty horses. There are gaps at the top and bottom of every wall. In the winter Nazi guards opened the building up; in summer they kept it closed. All elements of the camp were designed to lead to death. This structure was so effective in this way that many more were built on exactly the same model, and at times 1,000 prisoners were housed inside. The Russian army destroyed the many ovens in Birkenau, but everywhere we could see piles of bricks and row after row of chimneys where they once stood.
Others have said this better, but the question remains. How can human beings do such things to one another?
Search for wisdom rather than just knowledge. Never before have so many died so swiftly and with such efficiency. Think of yourselves as electric circuits. An open one cannot conduct electricity; a closed one passes it along. Know when you must pass along what is good—seeing the dignity of each human person, and to do good to him or her; and know when you must be the open circuit—the one who blocks, ensuring that what is dehumanizing, immoral, or evil is not passed along. Be an Oskar Schindler or a Paul Rusesabagina from Rwanda. They didn’t know what they were going to do before they did it. But when the right time came, they used all of their intelligence, determination, integrity, and resources to do what was right. Don’t you think what they did made a difference to the people they saved?
