| Auschwitz and Birkenau |
I've tried to choose my words wisely during my writing of this post to avoid offending anyone with my discussion of a topic as sensitive as the Holocaust. I apologize in advance if you take issue with what I've said. Perhaps I should take time to become more informed, or just keep my thoughts to myself, but this blog is intended to be a place for honest and candid reflection so I will use it as such.
We visited Auschwitz yesterday.
A complex of three separate camps - Auschwitz I, Auschwitz II – Birkenau, and Auschwitz III - it was the site of the enslavement and murder of over 1,300,000 Jews and members of various other groups deemed inferior by the Nazis. I felt somewhat unsure of what to expect from my visit, and as we boarded the bus from Krakow, Poland for the 60km trip, I began to wish we hadn't decided to go at all. I found visiting places like Yad Vashem in Jerusalem difficult enough, and I feared that going to the actual location where the Holocaust took place would be painful on an entirely different level.
The site of Auschwitz I had previously been a Polish military camp, taken over by the Nazis because of its desirable location on an island formed by a fork in the Vistula river. The surrounding water would make it more difficult for prisoners to escape, and so the Nazis moved in, forcing Polish families living nearby from their houses and using their timber and bricks to build barracks and several crematoria at nearby Auschwitz II – Birkenau.
Auschwitz I was turned into a museum in 1947 and still looks much as it did when it was in use by the Nazis. Several of the buildings have been converted into museum-like exhibits, with photographs and quotes from Nazi ideology posted on the walls. Some of the buildings house massive piles of shoes, suitcases, hairbrushes, eyeglasses, and combs – even an unbelievable 2000 kilograms of human hair, shaved from the heads of victims of the gas chambers and used to weave textiles for military uniforms. I suppose these displays are attempts at illustrating or summarizing the altogether massive scale of the Holocaust into something people might be able to understand, but for me it still remains inconceivable.
In hindsight, it just doesn't seem possible for any monument or museum to adequately convey what happened there. Some of the buildings, such as the camp prison and crematorium, remain largely intact, even with the same paint on the walls from the 1940s. I felt it was important to go inside and observe what was there, but at the same time I felt hesitant. I simply did not know how to react to the sight of a furnace that was once used to incinerate 350 bodies per day, and so what right did I have to stand there and stare blankly at it, as if it were a statue in a museum? I felt embarrassed to be there in my comfortable shoes with my expensive camera - luxuries the prisoners of the camp would have all but lost the will to even dream of - and try to comprehend how many lives had been destroyed. I simply never could.
We boarded the bus to Auschwitz II – Birkenau, 3km down the road but a world away. The huge site housed 100,000 prisoners in 300 wooden barracks before they were marched away to other camps in the winter of 1944 to escape the advancing Soviet front. Birkenau had four crematoria in operation before they were blown up by the Nazis as a means of destroying the evidence of what had happened there. Many of the barracks have not survived 60 years of Polish winters, but their brick chimneys still stand, pointing skyward like lonely monuments across the huge complex. Gazing out across the camp from the watchtower above the often photographed entry gates, one can see all the chimneys, almost too many to count and far too many to even believe. Being in that dreadful place made the Holocaust more real to me than ever before.
After leaving the camp, I felt a reaction that I had not expected. I began to feel personal guilt, not for what had happened at these concentration camps, but for being part of a society that I feel still has not collectively learned from the Holocaust, even when sites like Auschwitz lay plainly for all to see. Even today, evidence of widespread ethnic cleansing can be found in some parts of the world. It would be wrong to place direct blame on the United States and other countries of worldwide influence for the atrocities still occurring today, but I do believe that we as people and as nations could do so much more.
Another feeling that struck me was the lack of responsibility we ourselves take for the damage we have caused throughout history. The United States has never carried out anything even approaching that of the deliberate, calculated, and utterly evil nature of the Holocaust, but I do think it would be wrong to consider ourselves innocent on all counts. I was recently reading an article in the New York Times on the life of Robert S. McNamara following his death. One particularly striking quote from the article references the 2003 documentary, "The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara." The excerpt is as follows:
"In the film, Mr. McNamara described the American firebombing of Japan’s cities in World War II. He had played a supporting role in those attacks, running statistical analysis for Gen. Curtis E. LeMay of the Army’s Air Forces.
“We burned to death 100,000 Japanese civilians in Tokyo — men, women and children,” Mr. McNamara recalled; some 900,000 Japanese civilians died in all. “LeMay said, ‘If we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.’ And I think he’s right. He — and I’d say I — were behaving as war criminals.”
“What makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?” he asked. He found the question impossible to answer."
I find this question rather difficult to answer myself. I want to reiterate that I am not implying that the US has ever committed crimes like that of the Nazis during the Holocaust. Obviously there is a colossal difference between the attempted extermination of an entire race of people and the carrying out of defensive attacks on another country with which we are engaged in war. But I do feel that it is extremely important to remember that, as we stand and feel contempt, sadness, and perhaps even hatred for unforgivable acts committed by others, it would be hypocritical of us not to recall the pain and hardship that we ourselves have caused around the world and in our own country. We must also take some responsibility for the horror and bloodshed still occurring today in some parts of the world which we know about but do little to stop. While less was known about the Holocaust until after World War II, it is not difficult to find evidence that the United States government was aware of but made little special effort to stop what was going on in the Nazi concentration camps. This just seems like a lesson we should not have to learn more than once, but in places like Rwanda and Kosovo and even today in Darfur, it would appear that little has been learned at all. We have history's lessons at our disposal, and based on them we have a responsibility to do more to see that a greater level of peace is achieved around the world. To me, it would mean that the deaths of the 6,000,000 were mostly in vain if we were to simply mourn their loss and choose not to learn from it. |
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