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."
Recent Comments