Normally I don't write much, I just post pictures. Usually I feel that's the better approach since the pictures don't necessarily require further explanations. Most of the time my pictures are somewhat light, easy to take in. This time it is different and because of that I feel that I need to also say something.
Today I was in the same small rooms and barracks as literally hundreds of people who were waiting for their inevitable demise. I say hundreds because I am referring to any given moment during the camp's active years when they had closer to a thousand people living in one barrack, not to even mention the volume of people who actually came through the gates during those years. Prior to travelling to Auschwitz I read that while most people can't say that they like the visit, they cannot recommend against going there either. I suppose I would have to agree with those people. While visiting, one is forced to come face to face with something that we tend to push away.
We all know the history, we all know what happened. Still, just reading or being aware of something isn't the same as actually seeing the premises with your own eyes and just generally being in the presence of something of such magnitude. Barrack after barrack the realization of a gruesome past not too long ago becomes very much real and in-your-face. To see tons of human hair just rotting away makes you uneasy to say the least. Hundreds of pictures, mugshots, hanging next to one another and each one of a real person who came to an untimely end - dwarfs one's own problems. Thousands of cans of used Zyklon B, hand written death schedules and vasts quantities of removed clothing and personal belongings - haunting to look at.
In a time of social media, instantaneous gratification, duckfacing and, well, photography blogs, it is easy to put aside the fact that not so many years ago things were quite different for such a huge portion of people in this world. I knew what I was going to see but still it left me dazed.
Without going into the reasons or whys, I can say that the experience did make me feel incredibly bad, incredibly humbled and extremely confused at the same time. I suppose most people will feel that way after visiting.
I don't have any close relatives who were on these camps nor do I even know of any people who were. Plenty of people do, however, and most of the guides at Auschwitz/Birkenau have a family member or a relative who went through the horrors. I spoke to a guide who's grandmother is also a guide at Auschwitz and her late husband spent 6 months at Auschwitz II Birkenau. He survived, somehow. There are still of course living survivors including a few Jewish Sonderkommandos who were working on both Auschwitz I & II crematoriums. Talk about a tough job.
It is now night and I am back in Kraków. I've had time to reflect on what I saw and while it's still a very fresh experience I can say that it is worth having. It is no cliché to say that the human mind can be a terrible thing - and a genious one, too. It is impossible to try to relate to the guilty part of the equation. While war time realities are what they are and I can at least try to understand what it must be like, I do not want to understand the reasoning behind blind hatred. The kind of blind hatred which kills young children and their mothers is an overly frightening thing. Suppression, oppression and aggression combined with high levels of social-, political- and peer pressure can lead to kind of a mass psychosis, it seems.
Just recently I had an online conversation about Auschwitz and Holocaust in general with a bunch of acquaintances. The conversation involved people who seemed to believe that the killing that went down on these camps is grossly exaggerated. There were claims that after reading all the available information on the subject they were somehow entitled to that opinion. The idea, basically, was that some Jews were killed, yes, but nowhere near what the official sources say. Apparently the camps were mostly for work - not for killing. I guess these opinions, and the fact that some people can even have such thoughts, comes back to the earlier point I made - the age of quick information. We know have the pseudo-luxury of "knowing" about things by watching something on YouTube or Googling it up. Being so far removed from the actuality of what happened and having no touch with real people whose lives were affected creates a kind a sort of a bubble inside of which it's quite easy to formulate various theories and assumptions.
To second guess a very real genocide is to question people's intelligence. I am not even touching the subject of Holocaust denial or other David Irving-admirers, there are others who are far more equipped to give it the lack of attention it so badly requires.
That's it. I have not much more to add at this time. Do see it for yourself. I will end this post with a few additional pictures.
