Oświęcim
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The summer of 2004 provided me and a group of my students an opportunity to circle through a whole new region of Europe: Scandinavia and the Baltics. We’d begun with a pre-packaged tour for a few weeks, then taken off on our own for a month or so, each student going as far as they could afford to. We began in mid-July in Copenhagen (Tivoli amusement park, the Little Mermaid statue, a day trip to Hamlet’s Elsinore castle), and ended at the close of August in Copenhagen again, having run through the fjords and Arctic isles of Norway, the capital of Sweden with its zoo, astounded by art museums in Finland. The Occupation Museum in Estonia documented the horror of standing one’s ground politically (caught between genocidal Nazis and mass-murdering Communists). In Latvia, we chatted with an Austrian group about Bush-era politics while in a medieval fortress. We stumbled awkwardly through a neo-liberal, capitalist shopper’s dream in Lithuania, and then marched into Poland. After taking Warsaw, we filed down to the gemlike city of Kraków, which had been spared the ravages of aerial bombardment. Kraków remained elegant, dignified, and deceptively charming — deceptive, I say, because Kraków is the provincial capital over Oświęcim.
Oświęcim is more commonly known by its German name. As the forces of Nazi Germany brutalized their way through Poland in 1939, they chose to rename every city and town under old Germanic language conventions — to deny that Poland had ever existed. Denial of Memory. The bus we had taken to the main attraction passed by an incongruous and awkward Hot Dog stand right before it pulled into the entrance gates. Upon entering Oświęcim, my student group was separated and I found myself in a group of about thirty strangers, waiting for the English-language tour. Our tour guide had begun with his introduction to the history of the site when suddenly he was interrupted by another tour guide, a Polish woman with a severe cut of her black hair which hung in straight bangs on her forehead. Her manner was brusque, authoritative. “No,” she said as she interrupted our tour guide, “This is too many.” She stood in front of our group and stared at us a moment. “You, you, you — all of you on this side, come with me over here. This group is too big.” She moved her hands and like the waters of the Red Sea under the power of Moses, we parted. “Come,” she commanded, and marched off a few paces, not even looking to see if we followed or not. We followed.
The twelve of us followed her around, like disciples. She took us to one room, “Breathe deep,” she ordered. “You can still smell the people, and the disinfectant and mothballs. I will wait for you at the end, outside. Take as much time as you like. This place is important for memory.” Some of us lingered, some of us moved swiftly outside. She took us to the famous wrought-iron sign which greeted newcomers originally and still stood, hovering over a driveway leading to a set of neat, three-storey brick houses: Arbeit Macht Frei. (“Work will set you Free” — a slogan resurrected apparently unironically, on posters in the anti-mask protests that sprouted up across the U.S. in the summer of 2020.) She recited the names and titles of the famous residents and visitors who had passed through that gate and into those brick houses. Politicians, administrators, scientists, engineers, doctors. “Feel free to ask questions at any time,” she invited us. One of our group asked what she did for a living, other than serve as a tour guide. “My degree was in art history,” she told us unreservedly. “I studied the art of children,” she said, “…of the children brought here.” No one dared ask her follow-up questions about her studies, although we knew she would have welcomed them. We dreaded her answers, though we had no need to; she might have provided us with sentimental or inspirational accounts, but we feared that what she had to say might not match our wishful thinking. We avoided forming those memories.
She took us to the second half of the site. It was broader, vaster, far more ruined. The Germans had blown up as much of it as they could as they left, attempting to conceal their abominations. The train tracks leading right through the main gate are still there, but somewhat overgrown with grass. (I wondered who cut the grass, which must be done periodically.) Instinctively, we did not breathe deep here. We kept our breath shallow. The wide-open spaces were claustrophobic. We stared across a landscape of ruined brick chimneys. The few intact residences we saw here were mostly reconstructions, made with materials from the site. She showed us the latrines, and gave us some of the accounts about the humans immersed in them. We were beyond shuddering with revulsion.
Finally, she took us to the giant collapsed slabs of the chamber and furnace — the source of ash which drifted across the countryside in the summer and the winter from April 1943 to January 1945, when the building was blown up. Authorities estimated up to 768 cremations were performed at this crematory every 24 hours. Other structures (like the trenches designed to let the human fat flow out) incinerated 1,440 bodies every 24 hours. We were drained; she knew it and did not drive us beyond our limit, yet she remained steadfast: she was our Virgil, taking us through Dante’s Hell. “Any questions?” she asked us as she drew to the conclusion of her tour. Thunder rumbled in the distance as a blue-grey squall line moved in from the north-east. Hören Sie? (“Did you hear that?” I ask myself.) I raised my hand, a humble student, and stumbled through my question, “If I can ask, and I know this is very personal, but if you don’t mind, and I understand if you prefer not to…” I began… She looked at me, her eyes open, not judging. She may have known my question, but when I asked it, she paused. Maybe it was not a common question after all. I went on, “You have just led us through this place of horror, this hell. And at the end of the day, you have to go back home, back to your family. We will leave here in sorrow and grief. How do you do it? How do you go back into the regular world after being here and showing people, day after day this place of such horror?”
Her eyes roved a moment, then settled on the holy and foul dirt at her feet. “Well, I must admit,” she said with a slight chuckle, “My husband, when we go on vacation, has to go through my suitcase and pull out all the books on the Holocaust. I get a bit obsessive sometimes. But…” her voice faded off momentarily then resumed with striking clarity, “But at the end of the day, after I take visitors through this tour of Auschwitz and Birkenau, I go home, I kick off my shoes, and I mindlessly watch television for a few hours. And do I feel guilty about that? No. I am grateful. That is something these people never had the opportunity to do. That mindless moment of just relaxing, doing something completely trivial, that was not a pleasure they ever had here. And I am grateful for those moments, and I thank their memory for making me grateful.”
She broke off. Distant thunder rolled across the landscape from the north east.
“Stay as long as you need,” she concluded brusquely, “But be careful — the ground here is still full of iron bars left behind in the ground which held the barracks in place and this area is a popular spot for lightning to strike when our summer storms come through. Farewell.”
