I was grateful to be on my own at Auschwitz as Kaspar took off for a couple of hours. Because this was midweek in late October, I was nearly alone at the site. Gray skies with a light rainfall seemed appropriate. In silence, a morbid history surrounded me with its brick walls and barbed wire. The harrowing iron lettering over the gate: Arbeit Macht Frei. Work will set you free.
Much has been written and filmed about the Nazi concentration camps, but being there is an entirely different experience. Traveling from Berlin, where I'd studied the beginning of that power, to here, one of the cruelest sites of human atrocity, made my head reel. How recently these events had occurred. Certainly I knew dates and such, but being at the place created a fresh and ghastly resonance.
In Berlin, I pictured a mother holding her child's hand as they shopped for school supplies or celebrated a birthday or wandered around the zoo and then...they didn't.
In the Auschwitz museum, I stared, stupefied, at displays featuring huge piles of leather suitcases, stuffed toy kittens, wiry eyeglasses, high-heeled pumps, worn Oxfords, and dentures. These were not the day-to-day belongings of an ancient society. Fifty-five years ago, a businessman had carried one of those briefcases, a five-year-old girl clutched one of those toys, and a university student had strutted in a pair of those tan leather pumps and then....they didn't.
A teddy bear resembled one from my childhood, a child's party dress was not antiquated, and journals and books were not from the Dark Ages...and it seemed to me they should have been. My mind could not encompass this terror being so very modern. I ruminated on Bosnia, Rwanda and Darfur. What is wrong with mankind that in the face of scientific achievement, in a world of modern medicine and higher thinking, we can backtrack into such horrific behavior?
This place shook me deeply, as it was meant to do. I stood in the long, cold stables where Steven Spielberg had shot scenes for "Schindler's List." In these stables, where prisoners once lived stacked on top of each other, I experienced what a movie could not possibly convey. My hand grazed the frame of a wooden stall and I imagined other hands touching these same splinters. In the death chambers where women and children were herded to be showered and gassed, I felt a clawing loss of my own air as my stomach clenched.
After an hour and a half, I met up with Kaspar. In the rainfall we walked to Birkenau, or Auschwitz II, where bodies had been dumped into a green and murky pond. We stood still, side by side, under darkening afternoon clouds. Kaspar was kind to be there, and kind enough not to speak.
Our drive back to Krakow remained quiet. This time Kaspar's eyes stayed glued to the road. He'd had taken this drive before and knew chit-chat was impossible. As we parted back at the bus station, I palmed him a tip and wanted to hug him, but it didn't seem right.
In the dark of evening, I stumbled home to my hotel. I nibbled at some food in a Chinese restaurant, but my appetite was negligible and I gave up. Later I crawled into bed and wept. That night brought horrific dreams filled with awful images. I would remember this day forever, and that is as it must be. The Auschwitz museum had made its point.
When the German army packed train cars with innocents and journeyed them into hell, they separated parents from children, husbands from wives, and siblings from each other. My last night in Krakow, curled up in that hotel bed, I imagined what that terrible separation might be like. My month in Europe, both with and away from William, was sealing the relationship in my heart and I needed to let him know that. No, I can't imagine we would live our whole lives apart. No.
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