My wife and I went to Poland, and part of our trip was a tour of Auschwitz and Birkenau. It’s a strange experience and hard to write about.
It starts out almost too normal: our tour bus pulls into a parking lot and drops us off at a visitors’ center, where we show our tickets and pick up headphones so our guide can talk to us. It’s busy – lots of tour groups, lines of people. Just like any number of historic places you can tour. But then it’s our time to enter, and suddenly we’re walking under a gate that says “Arbeit Macht Frei.”
A gate I’ve seen in pictures all my life, as a symbol of horror and genocide, and there it is. We can stop and take a picture, or not. We can comment on it, or not. Now it’s just a physical object whose only power is in memory. Strange. I didn’t take a picture. We just walk in, knowing that in an hour or two we’re going to walk out.
We’re led around the grounds, in and out of buildings. This is where the prisoners slept. This is a room where they were tortured. This is a room full of hair that was collected, mostly from women. Here’s a wall where people were lined up and shot. Most of the facilities where the mass murders took place were destroyed by the Nazis as they were about to abandon Auschwitz, but there’s one left that we go through.
How can we process all this? And what must it be like to be the tour guide, who does this every day?
Then it’s back on the bus and off to Birkenau, just a few miles away. We see the railroad tracks going into it, another image I’ve seen so many times. It’s huge – just rows and rows of buildings that held the prisoners, on and on. Ruins of where the killing took place, again destroyed in an attempt to hide what happened.
On the way back to the bus, there’s a café where we can get some food or a coffee. Is it even OK to say I’m hungry – let’s get a sandwich? Feels weird. But I was hungry. Then we hop on the bus and leave, just like that. Check off Auschwitz as a place I’ve seen, like the pyramids and Stonehenge.
Our tour included another stop, perhaps as an antidote to the horror, an enormous salt mine that is amazing and worth seeing, https://www.wieliczka-saltmine.com/.
For us, life goes on and we continue to do new things. We remember the dead, for a few minutes here and there, and we carry on. Strange.
[This first appeared on Ricochet: https://ricochet.com/1771429/visiting-auschwitz]