The train ride from Budapest to Prague
has reached the 8 hour mark and allowed much more time for reflection (and jam
packed cars, an unliftable suitcase, and lots of sweat) than initially
anticipated. But all the better, given the nature of the topic below. On Friday
(July 13th), we journeyed to the Nazi killing center of Treblinka.
The experience there (as many others on this fellowship) is impossible to fully
describe and I find my language failing me even now, two and a half weeks after
the visit. Visiting Treblinka was a very emotional experience for me, quite
possibly the most of the entire program in hindsight. Coming from a daily work
environment at home surrounded by Holocaust-related discussions and texts, and
having previously visited Auschwitz, Birkenau, Dachau, and Theresienstadt, one
would think I would be immune to such emotion. I think it has something to do
with the fact that the barracks and camp structure still remain in the
aforementioned, and here in the silence of Treblinka, all that remains is a
monument and the occasional stone foundation since the Nazis attempted to
destroy all evidence of such a place. The emptiness at one of the Nazi killing
centers was profoundly unlike anything previously experienced. I believe that it
was in the silence—in the absence of seeing the buildings that moved me,
juxtaposed with the beautiful surroundings: blue sky with patchy gray clouds,
surrounded by a lush forest.
Yet I knew that where I stood was where
700,000-800,000 Jews were murdered between July 1942 and November 1943—a very high number especially given the short
time frame. I wanted to stop to think, to write, to pray, to anything, but as soon as I did, I was
attacked by mosquitos. Thus layered in jeans, a thick black jacket zipped up to
my chin and my hood on (despite the sun), I made my way toward the memorial,
swatting as I walked. I approached an open field where thousands and thousands
of stone slabs of varying dimensions jutted from the ground (17,000 in total),
with 700 bearing the names of towns where Jews who perished at Treblinka lived
prior to deportation. I wandered through the stones and into the surrounding
field full of purple, yellow, white, and blue flowers, countless orange
butterflies, and wild raspberries in the brush. I had weird feelings of guilt
for finding a place such as this so beautiful. Alone, I kept trekking to
Treblinka I (the work camp) a kilometer or so away. At this point I had 9 going on 10 bites
begging me to itch them, sweat trickling down my back, my stomach grumbling,
and yet at some point walking down the little stone road, I stopped caring
about the bites, my dampened clothes, my hunger… I felt so pathetic and utterly
insignificant. In an instant I no longer found beauty in the silence, I thought
of the hundreds of thousands of voices lost here in this place where I walked.
It made me sick. It also forced me to grapple with this sense of space and how
the way it is used affects our perception of the place (but these latter, more
coherent thoughts, came much later). Walking back to the van after visiting
Treblinka was a thoughtless blur.
Thus I end with the first line of Antoni
Słonimski’s elegy to Jewish towns:
“Nie masz już,
nie masz w Polsce żydowskich miasteczek” (“You no longer have, you have no
Jewish towns in Poland..”)
 |
| Panorama of the monument. |
No comments:
Post a Comment