Auschwitz

 Warning: This post contains some descriptions of the concentration camps Auschwitz and Birkenau and autrocities that were committed there by the Nazis. 

Jo: This is hard. Today has been hard. We did decide to bring the kids to Auschwitz/ Birkenau concentration camps (contrary to the vast majority of online opinions of concerned parents, strongly recommending against it) on a 7+ hour long tour of some of the darkest and most evil part of the history of man kind.  I am no writer, and to put the past 12 hours into any kind of relatable written language is therefore completely beyond my capabilities. I will try nevertheless:

At 6:30 AM we get picked up by our driver with an unpronounceable polish name ("call me Jack"), in a brand new Mercedes van. Jack is a man of few words and fewer facial expressions. He pushes the start button of an educational video about Auschwitz/ Birkenau that soon starts playing on our screen in the back of the van. The ride to Auschwitz is 1.5 hours and the video finishes playing as we pull into the parking lot. We did of course tell the kids what we're doing and what to expect. They were given the choice of not going, and chose to come. I am dreading this visit maybe more than any of my family members. Having grown up in Germany, with a continuous education about the Nazi crimes from elementary school until graduating high-school, like any other German, I carry a solid load of guilt for my country. 

Upon entering Auschwitz concentration camp, the energetic signature of pure evil that encloaks the entire complex of Auschwitz and Birkenau camps into a palpable heavy dark vapor, cuts off my airway, making it hard to breathe. I am choking down tears all day. Many get away. As we're walking through the gas chambers, where pregnant women and children were the first to be poisioned to death. Or the gigantic pile of human hair, representing only a fraction of the total hair collected from corpses, to be used for woolen socks for soldiers. Or in the basement of the prison, where prisoners where kept in "standing cells", with 6-8 prisoners on barely a square meter of space, void any light, for days, before they were executed anyway. At this point the experience is so visceral for me that I have to actively use mind-body techniques to calm my racing heart rate and keep me from fully panicking..

There is one part of this day that shines a light through the darkness and will always stay in my memory: After completing the tour a lady in her sixties comes up to me with tears in her eyes. She introduces herself as ''Denise' and explains that she is of Jewish descent and the first of her family to visit a concentration camp.  She then thanks me (!) for bringing our children here. I am completely baffeled and have no response but to hug her. We both cry. I tell her that I'm German and that I believe in the great responsibility of teaching our children about the horrible crimes my country has committed against humanity. Somehow this makes her day, and after more hugs and tears she asks to take a picture with me, to send to her family in Mexico. When we part, a deer runs accross the trail that lead to the gas chambers and disappears into the woods, bathed into the golden glow of the setting sun. 

After finishing our tour, Jack comes running to the exit, obviously aggravated and jelling "it's time to leave". We rush to the van and he starts racing back to Krakow, overtaking trucks on narrow country roads without any visibility of the road ahead. Several times he has to fully slam into the breaks to avoid a frontal collision. The soft jazz music he is playing over the stereo, does nothing to calm my completely worn out adrenal glands. I drench my seat in cold sweat and am more than relieved, when we finally pull up to our hotel in one piece. Phew. Don't piss off a polish driver in a rush, you will not win (and maybe not survive). 

Tosh: What to say about Auschwitz… Unlike Johanna, I didn’t feel any particular “evil energy” in the Auschwitz I. The perfect weather and beautiful countryside were certainly out of sync with the gravity of its history. Maybe it didn’t hit home because the depths of suffering and scale of the atrocity are so mountainous that it doesn’t seem real. Seeing the pictures of victims and the collection of shaved hair, collected shoes, suitcases, etc., I intellectually know are very authentic, tangible things taken from very real people, and this is only a tiny fraction of representative things to show people like me that this actually happened. But it’s tough to grasp.

Birkenau is different. I do feel a negative energy as I walk up to the remnants of the gas chambers and furnaces. Maybe it’s because of the hundreds of chimney stacks still standing in the field, each representing a bunkhouse stuffed full of hundreds of people being slowly worked to the extremities of exhaustion and finally incinerated after the last ounce of useful strength was squeezed from their malnourished bodies.

The kids ask the obvious questions, the ones all of us ask when we learn about the Holocaust. Why did the Nazis do it? Why didn’t good Germans stop it? Why didn’t the Jews fight? It’s hard to explain any of those answers concisely enough before a 10-year-old loses focus.

So, what did I take away from this?  I thought a lot about the reason the place has been preserved, “So that we shall never let this happen again.” Well, our record isn’t awesome there; just ask the Tutsi of Rwanda; any that are left, that is. Thinking on what the kids asked; How did it happen then, and how does it apply to us today?

Thomas Jefferson once made the observation that “An informed citizenry is at the heart of a dynamic democracy.” Said another way, a democracy will live or die based on an informed and politically participative populace. How did the German’s allow this to happen? There was a lot of coercion, but the Nazis were first elected. Many, even most, Germans must have turned a blind eye to all that the Nationalist Socialist party stood for. Maybe the party’s very real and demonstrated ability to ‘get things done’ and boost a destitute economy after WWI was enough to garner mass support, even if most didn’t agree with all the National Socialist ideals.

Why didn’t the Jews fight back? Well, the Nazis were very inventive in keeping secret the extermination parts of the camps, so as not to induce panic in those waiting for a “shower.” Rumors were only rumors. So, it would have been hard to convince anyone with no weapons to band together and fight to the death against the German war machine, and have their children do the same, based on a rumor that the train taking you to a “work/resettlement camp" might be actually be a train to Murderville.

I can’t help but think, how informed and involved is the American populace? Voter turnout in the last national level presidential election and midterms was much higher than it’s been in decades. I think people are acknowledging that something is awry in our political system. But I worry about the ‘informed’ part of the equation. In conversations I have with people, the most passionate folks are about one issue deep. I suspect most vote Republican or Democrat based on how the parties brand themselves and how the person feels that brand suits them; political affiliation has become more a dogma than debate.

One last thought kept rattling through my head:  the 2nd Amendment might be the most important part of our constitution. A government should have a healthy respect for the power of its people. 

Entrance to Birkenau: Very few who went through that gate ever came back out. 

Ruins of the gas chambers. Victims entered from the left and undressed for their "showers" in the long hallway. Chamber was in the room furthest away from camera.

The chimneys in the background represent hundreds of bunkhouses

So many chimneys; each a remnant of a bunkouse that housed thousands of people; hundreds crammed in at the same time; then murdered and filled with new people.

Witold Pilecki. One would have to mine the core of a neutron star to find material as hefty and dense as this man's balls. Seriously. Read the story on this picture (if you can) and/or look up his Wikipedia page. Warning: you'll feel less of a man by comparison. 

Pics of some of the victims. Note the dates of execution

This is in Auchwitz I, which was the 'Show Prison' that the Germans maintained some semblance of humanity for propaganda purposes.

Some of the thousands of suitcases on display; victims had written their name and address on the bags so they might be returned later after they were released from the camp. 

Shoes. Lots of them. Note that 20% of the victims were children; you can see some of the small shoes in here. 

Auschwitz I:  the fences were electrified