Return to Auschwitz and the great square of Krakow

My friend Cindy and I went to Auschwitz in the early days of January 2013.  I'll never forget rolling by the city of Oswiecim in the wee hours of January 6.  It was an eerie sensation to look out at that cold dark prospect.  When we toured the camp the next day we were lucky to have an excellent personal guide.  It seemed appropriate to see the camps in cold, snowy conditions, but truth be told it wasn't all that bad.  This time around I was seeing the camp on a hot day.  This too was a worthwhile experience because extreme heat (35C/95F), like extreme cold, exacerbated already horrific conditions for the prisoners of the camp.  Going through the camp under these conditions gave the visitors a sense (albeit, a very limited sense) for what it might have been like for the prisoners.

When Cindy and I visited in the winter of 2013 we saw only a few other people.  This visit was dramatically different.  The parking lot was full to overflowing with buses and private vehicles.  I don't think it is an exaggeration to say hundreds of people were there with us.  Our guide met us outside the administrative building of the camp.  We were each given listening devices, or what our guide called "whispering" units.  This proved necessary with so many other tours moving through the camp at the same time.

Photo by Sura Levine.

The tour began around 9:30, but the crowds were already growing.

Photo by Sura Levine

The buses loaded with school students made it clear that visiting Auschwitz is a field trip for kids in the geographical vicinity of the camp.  While I believe there is a lot of value in making this trip, I am concerned that there is a potential for trivialization.  Just to prove my point, a recent New Yorker article asked Should Auschwitz Be a Site for Selfies?  As appalling as this idea is, it's a reality.

Our Holocaust Education Foundation group leader (as distinguished from our guide Agnieska, or tour guides at various sites)  spoke a number of times about Holocaust tourism.  I have to say that visiting these sites in the summer certainly made me consider this idea at greater length than I had when Cindy and I toured in the winter of 2013, or when I was on my own visiting Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen last autumn.  It is disturbing and distressing to think of what we were doing in those terms, but it's hard to dismiss that notion out of hand.  Our group consisted of scholars and serious students focused on the Holocaust.  There was nothing casual about what we were doing, but there we were with all those other groups moving in concert with our guides from building to building, site to site.  The idea of Holocaust Tourism reasserted itself when we discussed the different kinds of tours (or packages?) available at the camp.  Tour A meant that visitors saw Barracks  x, y, z at Auschwitz I, and a, b, c sites at Auschwitz II/Birkenau.  Tour B consisted of Barracks q, r, s at Auschwitz I, and g, h, i sites at Birkenau.  Visitors can have three hour tours, or six hour tours, or something in between.  The "menu" approach to seeing the camps does seem rather "touristy".

Our group was on a three hour tour, which had only a few similarities with the one Cindy and I took (I think our January 2013 tour was longer).  On this tour we walked past Block 10 where women were subjected to sterilization experiments which occasionally led to death or permanent disability.

Photo by Sura Levine

Other women were murdered in this block just so autopsies could be performed for curiosity's sake. 

This tour didn't include many of the displays Cindy and I saw on our tour, but our HEF group did see the prosthetics,

suitcases,

and shaving brushes.

We also visited the execution wall between blocks 10 and 11 (although this is my photo from 2013),

and we ended our tour of Auschwitz I by walking by the gallows where camp commandant Rudolf Höss was hanged.  

Photo by Sura Levine

This had been the most emotional moment of my 2013 trip (I was furious to the point of vibration), but this time around, I was more prepared.

Our group ended our time at Auschwitz I theater in the administrative building to watch a film, after which we drove over to Auschwitz II Birkenau.  Cindy and I had also visited Birkenau, but on that trip we were focused on just one side of the camp.  On this trip, we had the opportunity to visit the other side.

Before entering the camp proper, we climbed to the top of the entrance gate tower, which afforded a view of the infamous selection platform.

Photo by Sura Levine

After looking at the horizon of the camp from the tower, we walked down to the selection platform and saw the cattle car.

Photo by Sura Levine.

We walked over to the gas chambers, which had a very different appearance than they did under the snow which had cloaked them in January.

Photos by Sura Levine

Our last stop was the Central Sauna

Photo from Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum.

which had held showers and disinfection steam chambers.  Today there is a display of photos there.

Photo from Auschwitz Birkenau Museum

It would have been great to spend more time with those displays, but it took about 15 minutes to walk there and about 20 minutes to walk back alongside the periphery of the camp to the main gate.

I wanted to get to the bookstore before the bus was scheduled to leave (everyone said it had one of the best selection of relevant books), so there wasn't enough time to do it justice.

It was blisteringly hot by this point in the day, so the bookstore was a really important destination for another critical reason--they also sold water.  We took a bit of a break there while waiting for our group to make it back there and noticed a sign warning visitors to cover their heads and carry water, given the  risks associated with the heat.

When we were at Majdanek I had asked the museum director for reading recommendations.  He suggested a memoir by Halina Birenbaum called Hope is the Last to Die.  This memoir is written as one continuous narrative.  While there are paragraph breaks, there are no chapters.  For 280 pages Birenbaum spares no details, offering up a grossly specific nightmare.  She was 10 years old when the Nazis invaded Poland and 11 when her family had to move into the ghetto.  Her father was part of the deportation to Treblinka in 1942 and she was 13 when she, her mother, brother and sister-in-law were sent to Majdanek.  Her mother perished in Majdanek, leaving Halina in the care of her sister-in-law.  Halina and her sister-in-law, were then transported to Auschwitz.  Ordeal heaped upon ordeal left Halina in a precarious state once Auschwitz was liberated in January of 1945, yet she found herself marched out of the camp and toward a transport headed north and west to Ravensbruck.  At the end of April, Halina found herself in one final camp, Neustadt-Glewe, where she was finally liberated.

As it happened, I became quite ill while reading this book.  Even though I was in pain and miserable, I kept thinking how lucky I was to have a private bathroom.  Although it may seem cliched and obvious, my focus on the Holocaust often reminds me of the privileges I enjoy and how much I take for granted.

Birenbaum's book, also raises the question which plagued and plagues all survivors--why did they survive and not others?

In a blog I recently posted, I referred to a book by Peter Matthiesen called In Paradise.  The setting is a meditation retreat set in Auschwitz I, with prayer circles located in Birkenau.  The book offers an interesting reflection on what it means to bear witness.  Other ideas range from the guilt and accountability of perpetrators, bystanders and survivors as well as their descendents;  questions of identity (who is a Jew, who is gay, who is Polish, who is a perpetrator, who is anti-semitic), what are the lasting lessons of the Holocaust and what is its continuing relevance.  Needless to say, the book offers no answers. 

Our visit to Auschwitz was central to our tour, and yet we didn't really spend time as a group reflecting on the experience.  I'm not sure what would have been gained from such a discussion.  As Matthieson seems to be saying, there are no easy answers to the question of why we must study Auschwitz.  Students of the Holocaust can not truly know what the prisoners experienced.  We can approach it, but we will not ever really know.

As it happens, I'm also reading Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz (once published under the title If This Is a Man) and I think he comes as close as anyone I've read to make THE compelling case for Holocaust Studies.  The edition of the book I'm reading begins with this poem:

You who live safe
In your warm houses,
You who find, returning in the evening,
Hot food and friendly faces:
     Consider if this is a man
     Who works in the mud
     Who does not know peace
     Who fights for a scrap of bread
     Who dies because of a yes or a no.
     Consider if this is a woman,
     Without hair and without name
     With no more strength to remember,
     Her eyes empty and her womb cold
     Like a frog in winter.
Meditate that this came about:
I commend these words to you.
Carve them in your hearts
At home, in the street,
Going to bed, rising;
Repeat them to your children,
     Or may your house fall apart,
     May illness impede you,
     May your children turn their faces from you.
                                                                            Primo Levi

Levi is invoking the Ve'ahavta and commanding readers to remember.  I've never read anything which comes close to the power of his words.

After returning from the camp, a number of us took a tram into the city of Krakow.  My friend had arranged a meeting with a  professor of Jewish Studies from Jagiellonian  University.

We talked about the Schindler's Factory Museum.  The professor had served as an adviser while the museum was in development.  She was the one who told us that the Jewish community in Lublin is very small and reluctant to have a very public presence. 

We had our evening meal on the beautiful square of the old city where we watched street performers.

http://www.inyourpocket.com/poland/krakow/sightseeing/Streets-and-Squares/Main-Market-Square_37319v

This city has such a long and complicated history. Fortunately, Jagiellonian University has a summer program on Jews of Poland:  History, Culture and Memory.  I'm sooooo tempted.

Many of the photos I included in this post were taken by my friend (and eventual roommate) Sura, as I hadn't yet figured out how to correct my camera's settings.  I am grateful for her generosity.