The morning we went to Birkenau (the
extermination camp) was by the far the coldest day of the trip thus far. It was
also rainy and windy, and while one can’t complain in such a sacral place of
suffering (where thousands died of cold alone), it was so cold and wet, and I had
difficulty concentrating on our guide’s 3 ½ hour tour as I tried desperately to
warm my fingers from the Renaud’s disease.
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| View of Birkenau barracks from guard tower |
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| Crematorium ruins at Birkenau. (There were 5 crematoria in total during the camp's history) |
On the way back to town, our drivers
stopped at the Judenrampe which is located a half kilometer or so from Birkenau,
which was where all of the transports arriving in Auschwitz stopped until 1944,
and prisoners would have to walk into the camp grounds on foot. (When one remembers
those iconic images of Jews arriving in the cattle cars inside of Birkenau with
the guard building in the background, those are during 1944, specifically with
the transports of hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews). Today the location
of the Judenrampe has a memorial cattle car on the train tracks, where visitors
coming to pay tribute have written notes and prayers, placed under small stones
within the various nooks and crannies of the cattle car. That is at least what
I remember from last year’s Amizade visit. This year I sat in the van, mostly because
I was so cold, and stared instead at the lone yellow house located right across
the street—its front door looking right at the site, a child’s play set gracing
the front lawn, toys spread on the grass, and a dog house. The shared thought
that crossed through all of our minds: “How could someone live so close to
where such horrors occurred?” as I imagined the children playing with the toys
in the front yard. Then again, that house was there before the ramp, before the
Holocaust and one has to think about normalcy and the need to go on living and
to raise a family…
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| The little yellow house next door to the Judenrampe memorial (taken from van window, hence the poor shot). |
My question though, is what do you tell
your children about the large cattle car across the street? How do you explain
the people coming to mourn, pray, and remember basically in your front yard?
Does living so close to such a site, desensitize children to other such sites
in Poland and throughout Central Europe? Or maybe it’s for the best, if done
carefully and right, to be able to teach respect yet move on and live in places
or near sites that in the past housed tragedy?
These are questions I have had for some
time. In July of 2011, when I spent seven days in Oświęcim, I first realized that
the camp is indeed separate from the town but also very present in the
community psyche, even if not by choice. On
a tour of Auschwitz II-Birkenau led by Wojtek
Smoleń, the son of famed
Auschwitz survivor (and former director of the museum) Kazimierz Smoleń
who recently passed away this year, I
asked Wojtek what it was like to grow up in ‘Auschwitz.’ He said that everyone
knew the facts, yet the town was also all they knew; the choice to be born in Oświęcim was obviously not theirs, thus
to not continue living normally because of the near proximity of the death camp
was never a question among him and his friends. They would frequent the
restaurants and bars, and even a club off the main street Generała Jarosława
Dąbrowskiego.
The local population also lives in the
buildings the Nazis built to house their wives and families. Even Auschwitz
camp commandant Rudolf Höss’s home became a private Polish residence after he
was killed. Should these buildings have been destroyed and new homes rebuilt
(albeit still on the same site) so the present population could live “free” of
Nazi crimes? The question sounds silly; if yes, seemingly all of Poland would
have to be demolished and rebuilt. So the answer is no; former Holocaust
buildings and sites remain in public use, yet even 70 years after the
Holocaust, this balance between ‘normal’ living and respect for the past (and
more importantly for the dead) has yet to reach equilibrium.
In addition to the ongoing debate between
daily living and respecting the past, a very intriguing and important (oh and
heated) discussion also arose over how our guide handled the tour of both
Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II-Birkenau which took up the majority of our group discussion
that evening. We were concerned how Mirosław
(who has been giving tours of the camps since 1991) told his narrative which
(when I asked him, he reponded) has remained relatively unchanged since his
inception as a guide. Well we all know that the past 20 years has brought great
changes to Holocaust historiography and to the history of Auschwitz in
particular. Yet our guide’s story was very one-sided and it was difficult to
ask questions and even harder to disagree. Another disappointing aspect was
that both tours (of Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II-Birkenau) went all the way to
the end of our allotted tour time which left no time for personal thought or
reflection or a chance to wander by oneself and take in the sight without the
continuous narration of Mirosław’s voice.
Needless to say, after a morning spent
in Birkenau and afternoon discussing the experience, we needed a break. After
several attempts of asking for a pizza “To go” from the one other food
establishment we frequented after Max Café, called Pizza Hit (maybe an attempt
at ‘Pizza Hut’?), Chris, Sari, Suzanne, Zach, and I headed back to the AJC to
watch the Polish language film “Border Street” about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
of 1943, quite the serious subject although the mistranslated English subtitles
had us laughing.
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