Auschwitz

So…there was one more part to our rollercoaster break. A rollercoaster of a different kind. We stayed in Krakow, which is about an hour from Auschwitz. Our final day in Poland was spent with a visit to Auschwitz and Birkenau. We went with a tour because you have to go with a tour. But there were many tours on the day we went. And no doubt, whatever day you visit, there are many tours. We got our yellow badges because we were in the yellow group. As we stood waiting for the tour to begin, I couldn’t help wondering if what we were about to do was voyeuristic. In those moments before the tour, standing with our group and watching all the other groups, I couldn’t help but wonder why I wanted to be there. Why did I want to stand in the place where so many people had been treated so inhumanely, so dregradingly, the place were so many had died in the gas chambers and others from starvation, illness or because they gave up hope. I almost decided not to do the tour. The thought stuck with me as we walked through the camps, saw the huts, looked at the small spaces people had to exist, walked past the thousands of shoes and cases, and the mountain of human hair cut from prisoners. Looking at the photographs of the first prisoners (they stopped taking photos because it was too expensive) and noting their ages and how long they lived in the camp before they died, was harrowing. Walking in silence through a gas chamber knowing this was where people, just like me, were hearded and then killed, was, well, disturbing. And then we walked past the gallows on which Rudolf Hoss was hanged. It almost seemed too good for him. And that was my struggle. Was I was beginning to think like him? What I have always wondered is how anyone could become like the Nazi’s (to name but one group) who can treat other humans like they did in the concentration camps in World War II. But they weren’t the first, and they haven’t been the last. Over one of the door to one of the huts in Auschwitz are the words: “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it” by George Santayana. Perhaps in it’s original form it read: “Those who do not remember history are condemned to repeat it.” I’m not sure we’re doing very well. The human race, it seems, has always had the choice between good and evil. Sometimes we find it in ourselves to choose good. But sometimes we find it in ourselves to choose evil. I read of a prisoner, present at the Nuremburg trials, who collapsed in the witness box when his former prison guard was brought in to stand trial. Everyone in the court assumed that he had collapsed because memories of his treatment by this man flooded back to him in those moments. But he said that was not the case. He collapsed, he said, when he saw this now dishevelled and frightened man standing before him, and realised that he was an ordinary man like himself, and that, perhaps, he therefore, was capable of the same crimes. The story of the Garden of Eden perhaps teaches that we all have the power to choose between good and evil. Being in Auschwitz and standing on the railway line at Birkenau like others who were on their way to be gassed have done, has caused me to wonder about myself and how I choose to live. How much do I value the differences in others and move towards embracing them? How much do I move towards finding fault with them and treating them in less than loving ways? I have some thinking still to do.