AUSCHWITZ DIARIES
A TRIP DOWN MEMORY LANE
Today being Auschwitz memorial day, I decided to go back on memory lane to the time I visited. Auschwitz without a shadow of a doubt is and forever will be one of the most fascinating places I have ever been. Despite all these years, quite strangely, not much has really changed about the place. Through the crematoriums, corridors, or even the open yards, there is still a bleak, damp atmosphere – a very weird aura all over the place. An eerie smell of death.
Arbeit Macht Frei - Work Sets You Free
To start with, although there are a number of theories surrounding why Auschwitz was strategically chosen as the place for this mass incineration, the widely accepted reason is due to its convenience in transportation and proximity to other Nazi-invaded Central Europe which fundamentally saw the brutality meted out to Jews, Romans, Sintis, Gypsies, Poles, Soviet POW’s, ethnic minorities, physically and mentally incapacitated, homosexuals. The list goes on. No one was left out.
The first room we walked through was the extermination room where we had a briefing about how the victims were killed. The canisters that used to hold the Zyklon B Hydrogen Cyanide were still on display in large quantities. In the early 20th Century, Zyklon B was widely used as a pesticide for rodents. In essence, using the same to exterminate a specific population whom the Nazis blamed for the defeat in WWI was more like poetic justice. It carried a great deal of literal and figurative subtext.
Pregnant women, the aged, and children under 15 years were automatically rendered useless as they were directly sent to the gas chambers as soon as they got off the trains. In one of the ordeals, as recounted by Rudolf Vrba, a man who miraculously escaped Auschwitz, he describes how humiliating it was seeing his family stripped naked right before his eyes marching to be executed.
For orthodox Christians, conservatives and Jews alike, there was hardly any further act of humiliation that could supersede this. After the extermination, the bodies were sent to crematoriums to be burnt and the ashes were used as fertilizers for the vegetation. Nothing literally went to waste in the camps. Absolutely nothing. Our tour guide emphasized this so much.
The Gestapo and SS designated special warehouses where some of the extorted luxurious items from the victims were stored to be taken back to Germany to be sold. They nicknamed these warehouses ‘Kanada’ which means Land of Wealth. In the early part of the 20th Century particularly in Eastern and Central European imagination, Canada was thought to be a place full of streets of paved gold - a land flowing with milk and honey.
Coincidentally there was a Canadian woman in her mid 50’s in our tour group who had already been sobbing the moment we entered the extermination rooms. The only thing that prevented her initially from shedding tears was the thought of it ruining her make–up. As we got to the crematoriums in Birkenau, she couldn’t hold it in anymore as she burst into tears uncontrollably at that time.
Our next stop during the tour was the prison block where Nazi POWs were held from 1939. The majority of them were Poles that had been captured after Poland was invaded on 6th October 1939. The hallway was weirdly littered with mugshots of the fallen prisoners who looked severely malnourished, with protruding chins, grotesque jaws and collar bone, and a weird look of terror in their eyes. It was impossible to tell the men from the women as both sexes had their hair completely shaved.
The last room we visited was a small clinic that was run by Prof. Dr. Carl Clauberg, a German gynecologist who performed mass sterilization and scientific experiments on Jewish women. Already having lasted for 4 hours, our last stops were at the gas chambers and crematoriums respectively at Birkenau II.
Undoubtedly, the holocaust together with the 20th Century Wars changed the European landscape by a ton mass. It has indeed revolutionized how they think of and treat each other. As for the Slavs, their anti-German views have been and will continue to manifest in many ways. No wonder when I was studying in Poland, my professor publicly confessed in class her vicious hatred towards Germany, Germans, and everything associated with that nationality.
The same could be said with our tour guide who apparently was born, bred, and had lived her whole life in the Auschwitz metropolis. Auschwitz (Oświęcim) is actually a metropolis in the city of Krakow located in Southern Poland. It used to be a society with people, an economy, a hierarchy, competition factions, and politics. This beautiful metropolis sadly metamorphosed into a massive death site we sometimes forget it was, and still is a metropolis.
Our tour guide told us explained how her grandfather was brutally murdered in the concentration camp, making her a second-generation direct descendant of a holocaust victim. It doesn’t take much in-depth thought to figure out the source of her underlying grief and hatred.
You can easily tell the vileness and aggression when they both speak about Germans. This is so common in Slavic countries especially when I spoke with Polish youth during the time I was living there. Overall, they share and spit similar vile sentiments. It transcends beyond patriotic and cultural differences.
‘‘Jews are a race that must be totally exterminated’’
Hans Franck 1944 (Governor General in Nazi-Occupied Poland
Right from the Nuremberg Race Laws, which drew the blueprint for all this, it is veritably evident how the Nazis were very devoted and particularly meticulous about this brutality. The things you see in Auschwitz recalibrate your moral compass 100%. A part of you dies when you visit that place. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who lacks both emotional and mental fortitude.
I think we sometimes dehumanize the holocaust by changing it into just numbers other than real humans who were slaughtered en masse. Sometimes when stories about the holocaust are told say 15,000 or 20,000 people are slaughtered in a single day, you have to do a bit of mental work in order to translate this into something concrete. To think 6 million people were killed in total is simply mind-boggling.
Auschwitz shows how dogmatic belief in any ideology can be weaponized to total destruction. Above all else, what really stuck with me is that no one argues with their own pain. Everyone who hurts acts as if their pain is real. It is in line with many religious traditions. The Jews are always recollecting their past pain. Christians celebrate Easter annually to remind themselves of the betrayal, brutality, crucifixion, and painful death of their Lord. The Buddhists believe the fundamental maxim of life is a life full of suffering. The ultimate reality is pain and it’s real.
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