Some thoughts on Auschwitz by William Tyler

In late July 2007 William Tyler, the youngest member of the Nashville-based band Lambchop, which has been touring Europe, wrote "some thoughts about Auschwitz," which he had visited during a break in the band's touring schedule. An email containing those thoughts made its way through cyberspace from William's father, musician Dan Tyler, to fellow bandmember Tony Crow to Tony's mother, Nancy Anderson, and finally to me.

I thought the email should be published as an essay or article, so it could find a wider audience. William wasn't interested in pursuing publication himself, but gave me permission (relayed, once again, through cyberspace) for me to publish his emailed essay on this blog.

So here it is.

So it was a week off in Berlin and a wanderlust bug told me to jump on a train and head east. I knew I wanted to see a city that hadn't witnessed complete destruction from the Germans, and also hadn't been completely disfigured by Iron Curtain fashion trends. Prague I had glimpsed before, Budapest was too far away, and so I decided on Krakow. A stunning medieval gem, buried deep in Poland; the Nazi bombs had spared it, unlike its sister Warsaw, and since I had already ventured to Warsaw before, I was keen to compare.

And then of course there was Auschwitz. The largest graveyard, perhaps the saddest, most haunted piece of earth anywhere in the world. I had read countless books from childhood on about the Third Reich, the Holocaust, and then endless back and forth sociological bantering about all of it. How, why, the usual intellectual attempts to put shape sort of rational, even scientific frame of method to explain why this crime against everything good and noble about human beings was carried out over five years. And Auschwitz was the symbol.

It was once a Polish village, about an hour's drive from the city center of Krakow. On the grounds where the largest portion of the camp, Birkenau, was constructed, the villagers were hastily relocated and their farm houses burned. In their places went wooden barracks and stone barracks and of course, the ovens and the gas chambers.

I was on a tour bus, one of those high riding coaches you see snaking along the highways all over the globe, sightseekers and wanderers gazing out the little windows at the countryside. The city center gave way to patches of green farmland, then somber groves of birch trees,then scattered villages, brick and stucco cottages adorned with satellite dishes and doorway lamps. Billboards for various American and European companies crept by as well, reminding me that what the Marshall plan failed to achieve in the East was rapidly being accomplished by the EU. As thousands of Poles fled to man the coffee houses of London, there was another tide of summer tourists and real estate savvy Brits sweeping in to the country.

As our coach squeaked by the last roundabout, we began seeing the signs for Auschwitz-Birkenau. The actual museum and visitor's center is located in what is known as Auschwitz 1, a former Polish army barracks that the Nazis rapidly converted into a concentration camp after the fall of Warsaw. About three or four rows of stone buildings,each about the size of a warehouse, and with windows staring out coldly at us like blind eyes. Our guide was a petite Polish woman of about forty, with a resigned air that seemed at times sad, sometimes stern, but, as she explained, "I have been working here for seventeen years. And it is sad; I am a guide at a cemetery."

It was an odd feeling that stayed with me for a few minutes. Just across the street was a sign advertising "Art deco restaurant / pizzeria," another for a small boutique hotel, a bus stop where an aging woman was waiting with a striking black haired teenager on a cell phone. And around me, people of various groups sipped cokes, shared cigarettes, passed bags of potato chips back and forth. Was I really here? When walking through a famous battlefield, or a cemetery, there is a ghostly trace in the wind; you are never really alone even when you sit by yourself for an hour, but this place was on first impression so unassuming. Apart from the notorious barbed wire perimeter, the barracks and the well kept grass around them was so orderly and empty it reminded me of some ghost town holiday camp from an alternate world.

The infamous wrought iron proclamation over the entrance gate "Arbeit Macht Frei" was another cold, cynical reminder of just how far the Germans had gone to make this place look like a legitimate prison camp for dissidents. There was a feeling in tracing the contours of those iron letters, rising and falling like a bell curve over the gate and then blurring into meter after meter of twisted barbed wire, once electric, that said to me, "Yes, this is true evil." So faceless, so thoroughly materialistic and perfectly shaped. A monster that needed no form but pervaded every inch of ground, every stone in the bed of rocks in between the two layers of barbed wire.

The barracks, still intact, have been converted into various exhibition rooms. Each one has a small black placard over the doorway with eerie proclamations like "Extermination" and "Material Proofs of Crimes" and "Road to Death." I had assumed going into this journey that there would be moments of emotion, perhaps, but no amount of reading columns of statistics, eyewitness descriptions, or even the silent black and white footage of bulldozers shoveling twisted piles of naked bodies into ditches and the hollow stares of the recently liberated can prepare one for what was, to me, the most wrenching visual evidence. The things they carried, the things they left behind,the debris of thousands upon thousands.

There is a moment when examining these different displays, all of them behind glass and illuminated with floor lamps like terrible shadow boxes, where one is simply left speechless. The only adjective that even comes close is staggering. For me, it was the hair. A room about the size of a small dining hall filled with two tons of white, flaxen hair, shaved off the heads of women about to be sent to the gas chambers, and discovered by the Russians in a warehouse.

A room dedicated to the process of genocide. A display case of invoices for thousands of kilograms of Zyklon B gas. Next to them, a handful of Zyklon B tablets, looking exactly like white gravel used to pave driveways in suburban houses. Across the room, a giant wall display of empty Zyklon B cans. I studied one of them, made in Hamburg, all of the information and address of the manufacturer. Then on the front side of the circular tin, the familiar skull and crossbones warning of the poison contents. I was reminded of how all bombs, all weapons of murder, in fact, bear the names of their makers.

A pile of shoes, thousands of pairs of shoes, like a junkyard precipice. Another room with a pile of children's shoes. I glanced at one pair towards the front of the glass; they were sandals with flower stitchings around the edges, and looked like a girl of four of five would have worn them. I stared at this pair for about a minute, trying to conjure up a human image from this last shred of evidence of a child who was murdered sixty years ago. Then I had to look away.

A twisted pile of eyeglasses, like some sort of fluxus construction piece. An entire room of dishes, cooking pans, water pails. People were told they were being relocated, so of course they brought along things to use in the kitchen.

A room full of suitcases, once again rising and falling like a junkyard tower. This may have been the hardest room of all, because the names of the dead were handwritten on the front sides of the luggage, with addresses in case they ever returned home. Glaser,Rosenthal, Rosenberg, Eisendstadt, Bermann, from places as far flung as Hamburg, Amsterdam, Budapest, Warsaw, Paris. Endless, endless.

A corridor of faces, dead faces. When inmates were admitted to the camp, the ones that hadn't been immediately ushered off to the gas chamber were tattooed with a number and photographed just like a prison inmate. Noble faces, most of them; I detected very little fear in any of the ones I stared at. One side of the corridor was women, all with heads shaved; the other, men. A few were smiling, a few smirking, many attempting to look proud, perhaps defiant? Under each photograph was the serial number of the prisoner, the date they were admitted to the camp, and then the date of death. I stared into the eyes of as many of these souls as i could, looking at the date of death and then looking back into their faces. Most of them had only survived a year or so.

A different corridor of faces, this one much harder to spend time in. Children, most of them separated from parents, and photographed in a similar mugshot fashion. Little boys and girls of twelve, thirteen, fourteen. Once again, date of admission, date of death. One girl of about thirteen reminded me of my sister at that age and I had to turn away. I glanced at another, a beautiful girl of twelve with long black hair. No date of death; she "survived." I wish I had written her name down.

Our guide explained that many of these children were hand picked by Dr Mengele for unspeakably cruel medical experiments. Children had blood drawn four or five times in a session. Sometimes they were given acid-based eyedrops so that Mengele could test to see if eye pigmentation could be changed by will. On and on. Evil in such a palpable form. Science unchecked, enabled by a machine-based culture of death. Where was Mercy? She checked out of Germany in about 1933.

In this same room we paused to look at a photograph of children liberated by the Red Army, staring with something between grief and wisdom out between the lines of barbed wire. Our guide pointed out one girl who looked to be about forty, her head wrapped in a white head scarf. "She is fourteen in this picture, but looks much older because of malnutrition. She is alive still, in Australia." One that lived to tell the tale, or perhaps try to forget it.

Our guide, in her calm, clinical monotone, like a nurse in a cancer ward: "Now we go to Wall of Death."

The "Wall of Death" was in between two of the barracks, and here, against a brick wall, summary executions were administered by the SS. Wreaths and candles were laid out, signs of memory triumphing over death.

"Here eleven thousand men, women and children were shot. The youngest child to be shot here was only seven months old." Our guide paused to let that settle in. She then told us a story of a Catholic priest who had volunteered to go before a firing squad in place of a Jewish man who was with a wife and four children. John Paul II later canonized this man.

There were many -- countless, in fact -- acts of this sort of bravery here. I wondered what smug old Richard Dawkins would say about this contravening the "selfish gene" at times like this. Of course, do tales like this mitigate such an unbroken litany of evil and cruelty? I don't know. Men and women who lived through it have written countless volumes on the subject. When I have the fortitude I attempt to wrestle with the issue.

Our final stop on the walk through the ground was the gas chamber and crematorium. It was an underground structure, much like a bunker or bomb shelter, overgrown with grass, and the only sinister reminder, at least from the outside, was the chimney, another evil edifice beckoning from its station. There was a marker outside the entrance to the bunker. It was written in three languages: Polish, English, and Hebrew. "You are entering a room where thousands of people were murdered by the SS. Please maintain silence out of respect."

I stood in the cold concrete room with about twenty others and our guide. She spoke softer than before. "Here is where the Zyklon B was dropped into the gas chamber." She pointed at the various openings in the ceiling; they were, in fact,  the only perforations in the concrete letting in light shafts down into the small room. It felt much like an empty wine cellar, and it was absolutely unfathomable as to how 500 people at a time were herded in here to be murdered.

Immediately adjacent was the crematorium. Four furnaces with long narrow trays on which two bodies at a time were placed. Burning took about twenty minutes. The ash was then emptied through the ground above and used for fertilizer. This was perhaps the most infamous crime scene in history, and it looked just like a disused boiler room, a few wreaths and flowers laid on the furnaces, condemning their lifeless cruelty with a sign of new life.

After a ten minute pause we were shepherded back onto the coach and drove the three kilometers to Birkenau, the much larger of the surviving two camps. Birkenau is the more visually iconic of the two. The sad train track running straight into the middle of the camp. The acres of hastily constructed wooden barracks, row after row after row.

The sun had been calmly warming our backs when we first arrived at Auschwitz, but an early evening rain had been ushered in. Pink sky glanced out behind blue gray clouds, and we felt a gentle pelting of drops as we walked down the rows of barracks. Auschwitz proper had the distinction of having a surviving gas chamber and crematorium, but at Birkenau, which had once possessed four, the Nazis were thorough in their attempt to destroy the evidence of their crimes. The first crematorium had in fact been exploded by inmates themselves, in a desperately heroic revolt at the end of 1944, when word began circulating that all of the inmates whose day to day work involved the running of the furnaces and the gas chambers were to be executed in short order so that there would be no witnesses to what had occurred.The scientific vanity of what Eichmann, Himmler, and all the rest had rejoiced over as a "solution" had given way to the animal panic of the hunted criminal. The Red Army was close.The truth would be uncovered.

We concluded our tour inside one of the wooden barracks where prisoners slept in awful wooden rows. It reminded me of pictures I had studied of slave ships in the Middle Passage, and how people were stacked in a grotesque manner like animal corpses. I noticed a pile of offerings: flowers, a few miniature flags from Hungary and Italy, and a very striking color photograph. It was an elderly man in his study room with five or six children surrounding him. They all wore proud smiles. Had this man been here? Was he reminding the cold ground that life had triumphed once more, at least here? I would like to think so. Where was he now? Israel, the States, maybe Europe. I so wish I knew the story behind that picture.

As we drove back into Krakow, the road blackened with the rain and the sun began its final surrender to the darkening sky. No one spoke, of course, even to each other. I heard one English teen of about sixteen or so mumble to his friend, "Something else, mate. It's fucking something else."

On the walk back to the bus I had struck up a brief conversation with an elderly couple from Swansea. "The numbers don't mean anything. You can read about this for years, but it's the seeing it up close that sticks."

I nodded. "Where did it become real for you?"

She sighed. "The hair. The room full of hair."

I told her I agreed. I told her about staring for a minute at that one pair of shoes. I looked around at the rows of empty barracks one last time as we drove off.

We are taught "Never again" or "Never forget," but what does this really convey? When I visited the Armenian genocide museum in Yerevan, I left with a passionate sense of outrage. How could anyone deny this atrocity? The answer, of course, was the Turkish government for the better part of a century. But the Holocaust, along with the African slave trade, the massacres and countless genocides against the NativeAmericans, the countless genocides against the Africans in the 19th century, the Aborigines in Australia, the televised massacres of the late twentieth century in Sudan, Bosnia, Kosovo, Chechnya, Rwanda; we accept them as facts, but have we learned anything? About truth, forgiveness, memory?

Holocaust deniers have always occupied a dubious fringe world of Islamic apologists and weekend warrior Nazis, but can't the world accept these terrible crimes as human tragedies that don't need to be politicized or debated, such as the Armenian issue is so shamefully treated as even to this day?

The famous Santayana maxim that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it is prominently displayed in one of the exhibits at Auschwitz. I would say that those who are unwilling to remember human evil are complacent accomplices in crimes that their own governments commit. Thus Vietnam, thus Iraq, and so on.

There is a Holocaust museum in Washington. It is the most powerful museum I have ever visited. There is no museum dedicated to the enslavement of the Africans; there is no museum dedicated to the endless genocides against the Native Americans. We have a Vietnam memorial, but to our fallen, not theirs.

I came to Auschwitz not as an American, but as a human citizen. Perhaps we should not say "Never again," but rather, "Forever we remember together."

Comments

[Orodemniades]

I don't know if I could ever visit one of the camps...the very idea of it sends me into floods of tears.

[Peggy Elam, Ph.D.]

I know. I cried when I first read William's account, and again as I was posting it to the blog. The parts about the children's effects, and the Catholic priest who gave his life for the Jewish father, were especially moving to me.