Hard to be Optimitic in Auschwitz

Though it wasn't on my original Europe itinerary, and I wasn't especially inclined to go out of my way for it even once in Poland, a few days ago I visited the Auschwitz/Birkenau concentration camp grounds and museum.

Now this is a place of obvious importance, reverence, and terrible history. I'm sure many people leave with a newfound awareness of what happened, appreciation of the scope, etc. I'm not sure exactly what I took away from the place, but I wanted to pass along some of my observations on this blog as a way to sort out my own muddled thoughts on the issue.
If you're looking for brilliance, you've come to the wrong place.

Also please note that the museum has a 14+ age limit due to the graphic nature of the facts, then it proceeds to show very little graphic pictures, video, etc. In fact, for the most part, the camp and its guides mostly rely on innuendo and euphemisms to talk about the severity of what happened here, but i found that all very confusing and misleading. So in this blog I intend to speak very directly about very gruesome things. Please take my word that I don't do so to be insensative or disrespectful, but my (semi-whitewashed) tour convinced me of the dangers of glossing over the gruesome "fine print" of the final solution.

First, a very brief background of facts which i was only partially aware before visiting: Auschwitz was originally a small Polish army base, really just a kitchen and a series of barracks, before the dual invasions of Germany and Russia in 1939. Shortly after the fall of Poland, Germany needed a place to put the intellectuals, politicians, and revolutionaries that were a huge part of Polish social resistance, and so they put up a fence and made a small base into an equally small prison. And thus it remained, with the eventual inclusion of Soviet POWs and more Polish political prisoners until 1942. During this time, the SS converted the old ammo bunker on the base into an experimental crematorium, with a rudimentary gas chamber and three furnaces. I cannot stress enough how eerie it was walking through this site, still largely intact, or how confusing it was to learn that Only about 1,000 people actually perished here.

You see, this experimental unit wasn't very efficient. It couldn't kill very many people at a time, and the furnaces took over 2 days to dispose of the bodies. This is all very grim, but please stay with me.

Due to these problems, coupled with the relative success of the now "field-tested" cyclon-b gas, Nazi command decided to upgrade Auschwitz, and started sending prisoner work crews to construct the "Auschwitz II - Birkenau" camp about 3 km away. Completed in 1943, Birkenau is where the horror happened, where over 1 million people were systematically executed and cremated, with thousands more dying of sub-human conditions, summary executions, medical experiments, etc. And it all happened in about 18 months. Birkenau effectively closed down in November 1944, the SS began dismantling and hiding their crimes as the Soviets advanced, and finally captured the camp in January 1945.

So there's the history lesson, but here's the context behind it: A couple things become clear from looking around Birkenau. First, this was now temporary construction. The layout of the barracks, the emergency stations, the fences, and especially the railroad leading directly to the primary crematorium buildings, all bare witness to the fact that the Nazis had every intention of using this camp, at full capacity, for the foreseeable future. In 18 months they eliminated from existence 1 million people, but the stone works and infrastructure suggests this camp was designed to fulfill its purpose for at least 5, and maybe as many as 20 years at that same pace. And that's why, for me, the Nazis always seemed the worst sorts of villians. Atrocities happen elsewhere, and I don't mean to belittle them in anyway. But to my mind, taking 10,000 or even 100,000 people out into the woods and shooting them just cannot compare with the construction of a site designed to so specifically to wipe out human existence, no matter how many or few people actually perish. It's the terrible audacity of the intention that I just can't get over.

And that was the first thing that struck me as terrifying. I felt a little cold and inhuman since the tragedy of the actual genocide didn't affect me as deeply as I felt it should have, but the realization of just how far the Nazis were prepared to go, not just ideologically, but logistically and practically, was and remains very scary to me. The logic, the rationale, and the skill with which they designed and implemented their terrible plans make it impossible, for me, to continue on the myth that Nazis were crazed monsters and mad men. These were people; smart, rationale, probably even moral, people. And they conceived this place in the same way that we now build airports and skyscrapers. OK, building an airport is nothing like engineering mass genocide, but that fact that the same rules (and tools) of industry and efficiency applied i find really chilling.

There is much more I'd like to express, but I'm still wrestling with it. The Holocaust is a powerful and terrible part of our modern history, but its existence and details are also widely known. This wasn't like my trip to the Wielczka salt mine, where I learned more about salt than i could ever hope to forget. Most of the facts I learned at Auschwitz I already knew, and in some ways that did make it less impressive, like the murder of millions was somehow old hat, but the experience of witnessing the magnitude and brutal decisiveness of it is something i don't know how to convey.

The museum loves conveying the magnitude, though. In over a dozen exhibits they have piled up the personal belongings collected from the dead before cremation. "Waste not, want not," must be a German addage, because they saved, stockpiled, and re-used everything. Not a very good poster child for recycling, but the same idea. Gold teeth are an obvious choice, but the mountain of shoes, the piles of glasses, the avalanche of tooth brushes - over and over these help clarify the sheer number of people we're talking about, and magnify the effect. The most shocking had to be the room of hair, where they shaved the hair off the women (usually after death) and then sold it to German textile companies for making blankets, etc. A couple vintage textile items on display with chemical traces of cyclon-B (from the deceased's hair) in their fibers is even more gruesome in retrospect than it seemed at the time.

Anyway, it's a hard place to talk about because there's so much tragedy, so much guilt, and so little justice for it all. I'll admit i felt uncomfortable when I was passed by a German-speaking tour group, though certainly they had no more direct connection to this place than i did. Or what about the latent Polish racism that turned a blind eye to it all? I spoke with one young Polish girl who, very embarrased, confessed that her grandmother continues to believe that in some way the jewish deserved what they got after decades of financial supremacy and abuses of their polish neighbors.

I'm not suggesting any of this is a good representation of all Poles, all Germans, or any universal reaction to the events at Auschwitz or elsewhere. I'm just struggling to understand how even one of the most evil and tragic movements of the past... 200 years? more? how even it can be more than a black-and-white issue. We all like to blame the Nazis, mostly because they aren't around any more. They make good TV villians for the same reason. But what created the fanatical hatred of Nazism, and also what allowed others to ignore its beastly actions, are all part of what we've become as individuals and as modern societies. And that's why the holocaust is so white-washed. It happened, it happened within living memory, and not only did we as a race not jump up to stop it, we have to admit that under the right circumtances it could happen again. We cannot deny that human nature allows for this level of evil, and I guarantee when it comes back around the efficiency of the 21st century will be exponentially more devastating than that of 1942.

and that just scares the crap out of me.

weber (on the lamb)