Auschwitz

Most of you will have already seen the pictures, but I think they deserve an accompanying post. On Saturday, in the midst of our visit to Krakow, I had the opportunity to visit Auschwitz.  Oddly enough, it was a place to which I have always wanted to go.  I know that sounds strange, but I have always been fascinated by the holocaust and have read dozens of books over the years on the subject.  I think my fascination stemmed from the fact that I could never quite understand how such a thing could have happened.  I was moved by the stories of the survivors, but even more so by the stories of those who never had the chance to write their account.  I remember scanning the faces in pictures and wondering "what were they thinking" as they were marched off to the gas chambers.  I also remember wondering why didn't more of them survive?  Why didn't they fight harder for their lives?  Why didn't someone do something to end what was clearly insanity?  Auschwitz answered these questions for me, but in a way I hope never to experience again.
It is an impressive place, actually.  The organization of the whole operation is astounding.  Each building, each guard post, each brick had its own sinister function that contributed to the greater operation that can only be described as a bureaucracy of extermination.  The Nazi's business was death and they were good at it.  I am not sure that at any other point in history any group has devoted so much time and energy to extinguishing life and certainly no one did it as efficiently as the Nazis.  It is simultaneously sickening and fascinating to wander the blocks of Auschwitz.  Even as a shell of its former self,  containing only remnants of the pain and horror it once represented, Auschwitz is a horrible place.  It is also a very quiet place.  It's as if history itself is ashamed of what happened there.  I was ashamed.  Earlier I stated that Auschwitz had answered some of the questions my history books never could.  I said that I used to wonder why more people didn't try harder to survive.  I used to try and imagine what I would have done had I ever been sent to a concentration camp.  I imagined myself a survivor, being resourceful, resilient, strong.  Now I know that I would not have survived.  Not only that, but at a certain point during my visit, I realized that I would not have wanted to.  It is a hopeless place.  That is the best way to describe it.  It not only extinguished the lives of over one million people, it extinguished their hope.  Pictures line the walls of several hallways in Auschwitz I, denoting a prisoner and listing their date of entrance and date of death.  The average survival time was about three months.  Three months was all it took.  And I am certain despair overcame many long before death brought relief.
It was -12 degrees celsius (10 degrees fahrenheit) the day we visited.  I was dressed warmly, with a coat, hat, leggings under my jeans, and two pairs of gloves for my hands.  One hour outside was enough to numb my hands and feet and chill me to the bone.  One hour outside was enough to convince me that, had I been a prisoner, I would have welcomed death in a matter of weeks, not months.
There were many terrible things to see at Auschwitz, but a few stand out.  First there were the gallows.  Such a simple structure.  Next there was the prison block where disobedient prisoners were either locked in starvation cells until they died (their carvings can still be seen on the walls), forced to stand overnight in dark, crowded 'standing cells' or suffocated to death in the 'dark cell' where thirty or so people would be packed with no access to fresh air.  Then there was the execution wall - a brick wall outside of the prison block where prisoners were shot daily for manufactured crimes.  Finally and most frightening of them all was the gas chamber.  A large grassy hill with a chimney is all that one sees from the outside.  But the inside is a place of terror.  I stood in a room that saw the deaths of thousands of people.  I walked in as they would have, the only difference being that I was able to walk out again.  I saw the holes where the zyklon-B pellets were dropped into the room.  It took twenty minutes to suffocate 700 people.  Directly across from the gas chamber in an adjacent room is the crematorium housing 5 furnaces.  It took 24 hours to burn 300 bodies.  You can do the math.
Auschwitz is a powerful place.  There is nothing happy about it, nothing hopeful.  Not even the thought of its liberation can bring any comfort.  I wonder at the resilience of the survivors.  No one should have been able to walk out of Auschwitz.
Not only is it terrible, but it is important.  Because it could happen again.  We cannot be so naive to think that we are protected from such tragedies by democracies and "modern society."  Mankind has always been and will always be capable of committing atrocities like the holocaust.  That is why the drafty barracks still cover nearly 400 acres of Polish landscape.  We cannot be allowed to forget what we are capable of.  We cannot allow this to happen again.