By Oscar Virdee
Trigger warnings: Death, the Holocaust, genocide.
As the Uber drops me off outside Hotel Maltań in Krakow city centre, a group is forming on the unforgiving pavements. A couple introduces themselves to me, mistaking me for the tour guide. We laugh off their error and fall into discussion about why we are going to the camp.
My motivations are mixed. On the one hand, I studied the Holocaust for most of the previous academic year and wanted to aid my comprehension of the horrifying reality recounted in textbooks. On the other hand, a more personal motivation: my great-grandfather was detained within Neuengamme, Buchenwald and Stalag Muehlberg. Whilst he did return, like many others he was haunted by what he witnessed in the prisoner-of-war camps and struggled to recount his experience, leaving me in the position to uncover the tragedies myself. Moreover, having a close friend who grew up in Krakow, the city is significant to me as the seat of kings and dragons, a place of unique artwork and architecture. This contrasts the mainstream perception of the city whereby Krakow is synonymous to Holocaust, and inherently associated with the perversions committed by those “just following orders”. To some edge, I suppose it is the desire to explore these two sides of the city that drove me here.
The couple’s motivations however appear less personal, less educational. Spending a long weekend away in Krakow they had heard many times over the phrase “you have to go to Auschwitz,” and like numerous others obeyed this tourist obligation.
As the bus eventually rolled up, I couldn’t help but feel daunted by the experience I was about to undertake. Feelings of trepidation engulf me throughout the hour-long journey to Auschwitz Birkenau. I expect civilisation to stop miles from the camp, as if to preserve the unnatural landscape that the Nazis left behind. To my surprise, as we approach the site, civilisation surrounds us. A stone’s throw away from where 1.1 million people were killed, lies a café, coach station and the town of Oświęcim. As we get closer to the building’s entrance, the impression of a place of reverence is further shattered.
A cacophony of languages is spoken here; I catch phrases of Spanish, French, Italian, Danish, even German. The atmosphere is not one of despair, remembrance, or reflection, rather it reminds me of a football crowd, with tour groups weaving in and out of each other like disorganised shoals of fish. It is only once we have passed through the security checkpoint and been given our headsets, that a sense of reservation and reverence descends upon the group.
We pass under wrought iron gates bearing the great lie of the propaganda machine constructed by Goebbels: “Arbeit Mach Frei” – Work will set you free. The sense of a great lie draws my mind to Wilfred Owen’s poem, Dulce et Decorum Est. I draw parallels across the poem to the groups as we are all deaf to each other; rather than being drunk on fatigue, we are intoxicated by the cruelty of mankind.
We pause as our tour guide explains how every morning thousands of Holocaust victims were forced to march out of these same gates in lockstep. My spirits are lifted as I consider how upset the Nazis would be to see people of the races they deemed unworthy of life wandering about without any sense of the ‘order’ they sought to impose. The slightly raised spirits are temporary and flee quickly.
Our tour guide ushers us into the first building. The sight that greets us is not daunting. In fact, it is unimposing; its presence could even be missed. However, the guide explains its significance: a small urn, full of human ashes that were gathered when the camp was liberated.
Questions we hope to avoid surface in our minds – How many people’s ashes are in there? How many were missed? How many souls were turned to dust and scattered to the winds?
Our spirits further drop as the guide explains that these are only the ashes that Allied forces managed to save on the first days of liberation. There is no doubt, we will never know the exact number of lives that were stolen in this place. The tour guide allows a moment of silent reflection before pressing us on towards another building. So that we may witness, so that we may remember.
The next building holds the horrors that I am sure everyone has read and heard of. Rooms filled with the last physical remnants of people’s lives, full of shoes, collections of glasses, primitive prosthetics. I’ve heard, and studied, about the room that fills me the most with despair, but nothing could have prepared me for it. A room that is full of human hair, shorn from the heads of men, women, and children. Hair that was then repurposed for the clothes of the SS. At first glance, it appears disorganised, mounds of human hair piled on top of each other. It is only a second look that you can pick out French braids, plaits and other hairstyles of the women who believed they were on their way to a new future, a new life.
I am reminded of a seminar in which we covered the transport of Holocaust victims from ghettos and cities, the conditions in which they were transported, how hundreds of people died along the way. Yet the women pinched their cheeks when they got off the train to make themselves look more ‘alive’ than dead, they carefully braided their hair in an effort to regain the dignity, honour, and humanity that had been stolen from them while suffering inside those unimposing cattle cars.
The darkest aspect of the camp is undoubtedly the gas chambers themselves. We learn that Zyklon-B was initially a pesticide, and Holocaust victims originally looked forward to the ‘showers’. It is important to know this, to know the lies that a corrupt government can tell and how it influenced the general populace to follow their genocidal ideals. It is another thing entirely, to stand in the ruins of where at least a million people died. No amount of knowledge can compare to the coldness, horror, and panic that surrounds you when you stand in that gas chamber. The silence is suffocating. If those walls could speak, what horrors would they tell? Would they tell of hope surviving even during so much death? Would they tell of families embracing one another as the air is stolen from their lungs?
From Shlomo Dragon, a surviving Sonderkommando, we know the answer to some of those questions: mothers would call out to their children, children would call out to their mothers and fathers.
Birkenau brings a completely different sense of dread. From seminars, I know that the camp is 140 hectares, and it was built for one thing – genocide. Still, there’s less of a regimented aura of Remembrance. The song of a Jewish school group deafens the sound of rattling barbed wire. Litter is visible in the ditches, moss clings to the exploded ruins of the gas chambers and crematoria, a speaker system is being set up at the Holocaust memorial. The scars and bone of the camps will always remain thanks to the efforts of the Auschwitz Museum, but for the most part, nature’s reclaiming of the site has begun a healing process of the wounds inflicted by the Nazi party.
On the walk back, the crowdlike atmosphere returns. Outside the gates where there were once the screams of the dying, now sees the energy and chatter of a regular mixing of people, but we are all changed, we are all second-hand witnesses to the destruction humanity is capable of causing.
After returning to my friend’s house in Krakow, her family asks me about my experience. At the time, I did not have the words to express how I felt. I remarked how I thought there ought to be a few miles of preserved landscape around the camps. My friend and her mother counter me at this, asking, “What do you want people to do? This is still our country.” I cannot help but smile at the pride of the Polish. Atrocities and genocides were committed upon them, yet they have rebuilt, grown and prospered.
Every time I am asked about my experience of Auschwitz and Birkenau, I parrot the words uttered to me by friends, my lecturer, by so many others. “You have to go Auschwitz,” they all said. I now hold this belief. It is necessary for everyone to witness what the worst of us can do, it is necessary to stand in the gas chambers where millions died, to feel coldness brought on by past souls, to witness and state, “Never again”.
Retrospect Journal 