Visiting Auschwitz

 

My wife and I went to Poland a few weeks ago, 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.

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  1. Susan Quinn Member
    Susan Quinn
    @SusanQuinn

    I visited Dachau while in Germany, 50 years ago. There was only a museum at that time, but it was enough to make a lasting impression. To this day, I have been to the holocaust museum in Israel, but I can’t bring myself to visit any others. Good for you for going, Matt.

    • #1
  2. QuietPI Member
    QuietPI
    @Quietpi

    Summer of 2021, primarily on a tour visiting sites important in the Reformation.  Toward the end we visited Dachau.  I had a   very similar experience.  Dachau was mainly a work camp, so the killing was a secondary operation.  But things remain – the killing room, the incinerators in the next room.  

    April 29, 1945, the U.S. 7th Army liberated Dachau.  As they approached the prison the encountered more than 30 railroad cars filled with decaying bodies.  Two days before about 7,000 of the prisoners were marched out on a death march.  About 30,000 remained in the camp.  

    The residents of the nearby town of Dachau tried to feign ignorance over what went on in the camp.  The American general would have no part of it.  He ordered the entire population lined up and made them march through the camp.  

    Our tour guide was very interesting.  He was probably in his mid 40’s.  He said that he was angry with his parents for hiding from him what had happened.  They vaguely said that something had happened.   It wasn’t until he went to work at Dachau as a young adult that he began to understand the full truth.  Today, by law, all German students must visit at least one of the concentration camps.  Still, he was alarmed by the number of young people who seemed not to be interested in learning what had happened.  

    My pastor was also on the trip.  As we were quietly loading the bus, he said to me,” I know a lot of politicians who need to see this.”  Yeah.

    • #2
  3. kedavis Coolidge
    kedavis
    @kedavis

    QuietPI (View Comment):
    My pastor was also on the trip.  As we were quietly loading the bus, he said to me,” I know a lot of politicians who need to see this.”  Yeah.

    And the ISIS-made and Hamas-made videos, etc.

    • #3
  4. Nohaaj Coolidge
    Nohaaj
    @Nohaaj

    I also visited Dachau about 12 years ago.  No tour. Solo. took a regular bus that has a stop nearby.  The weather was dour, cloudy, sleety, a cold wind.   I had a nice hiking boots, insulated gloves, a big wonderful ski parka. I started walking thru the camp, head down, tucked into my parka, trying to avoid the weather.

    When I entered the first building the walls had pictures of the prisoners in their striped, thin cotton garments, standing at attention, in weather that looked every bit as cold and miserable as i had just walked thru, hunkered down in my parka, with boots and gloves. I felt so ashamed. 

    I was the only person in the prison that day.  Not another living soul. But it seemed that thousands of souls were screaming in agony as I walked slowly thru each building.  This room for experiments, this room for torture, this room for turning skin into parchment.  

    I forced my self to stand outside for just a few minutes, in the cold, without my hood. head upright. 

    I left and silently cried.  Crushed by the immense evil. 

    • #4
  5. Kevin Schulte Member
    Kevin Schulte
    @KevinSchulte

    I don’t think I could go .  My eyes watered while reading your post . However , thank you Matt for your report . 

    • #5
  6. QuietPI Member
    QuietPI
    @Quietpi

    Kevin Schulte (View Comment):

    I don’t think I could go . My eyes watered while reading your post . However , thank you Matt for your report .

    I appreciate that, @kevinschulte.  Mrs. QuietPI opted out, and it was the right decision for her.  She wasn’t the only one.  

    • #6
  7. The Scarecrow Thatcher
    The Scarecrow
    @TheScarecrow

    I too visited Dachau, while on a European see-the-world trip in my twenties. I will never forget it.

    Im usually a wag, a Monty Python quoting, wise cracking fun hang. As are we all, probably.

    We were smiling and wise cracking on the way in. The bus was silent on the way out.

    There is evil in the world. I saw it right in front of me at 26. I’ve never forgotten it.

    • #7
  8. Andrew Troutman Coolidge
    Andrew Troutman
    @Dotorimuk

    I’ve never been to the nazi death camps, but I’ve seen the stacked skulls in Cambodia. You can FEEL the evil.

    • #8
  9. Susan Quinn Member
    Susan Quinn
    @SusanQuinn

    Andrew Troutman (View Comment):

    I’ve never been to the nazi death camps, but I’ve seen the stacked skulls in Cambodia. You can FEEL the evil.

    I’ve seen those, too. You can, indeed, feel the evil.

    • #9
  10. jzdro Member
    jzdro
    @jzdro

    Thank you, @mattbartle

    How were the other tourists? I hope you had no additional layer of horror resulting from levity or heedlessness on the part of other tourists. I’d heard of that enough for it to have kept me away, when we were in the area of Auschwitz last September.

    I appreciate your report.

    And the Wielicka Salt Mine – terrific, eh? It was my second visit there, and I got to show the offspring.

    • #10
  11. Brian J Bergs Coolidge
    Brian J Bergs
    @BrianBergs

    Visits to those places are unsettling to a normal person.  My visit to Auschwitz was 1979 and Dachau in 2000.  I don’t need to go back.  The visits still haunt.  In Auschwitz, the long case filled with shoes taken from the victims shook me to the core when I thought about their previous owners.  Touring the gas chambers at Auschwitz was more than unsettling.

     

    • #11
  12. The Reticulator Member
    The Reticulator
    @TheReticulator

    I learned just this afternoon that one of my (probable) ancestors from the 1700s was a woman whose maiden name was the same as the name of a Nazi concentration camp in eastern Poland. It’s a surname that one genealogy site says is now more common in Israel than in Poland.   I’m going for a bicycle ride now, but will give your post more attention later.   

    • #12
  13. Eugene Kriegsmann Member
    Eugene Kriegsmann
    @EugeneKriegsmann

    My first wife had visited there in the 1960s when she was working in the DOD dependent schools in Darmstadt. She had a book she brought back entitled Wir Haben ist Nicht Vergessen. Forgive my German if I have not reproduced that title exactly. It has been a while. 

    The book contained the photographs the Germans themselves took documenting their crimes as though they were actually proud of what they were accomplishing. They were horrendous to look at. I have never had the desire to go to that actual site. The images in that book were complete enough to burn in my memory. Walking through the camp might be more than even I could tolerate. The deniers may not be convinced by walking through the site, but the photos are undeniable. The pile of emaciated bodies, the sundercommandos loading bodies into the trays that delivered them into the ovens, the dead body hanging on the barbed wire fence, the firing squad shooting lines of unarmed civilians including women and children. These images will never be wiped from my memory. What it  must have been like for the Americans and even Russian troops who first came upon those camps before they were cleaned up and sterilized cannot be fully appreciated. 

    I have read enough history to know that mass killings were a part of almost every war in human history. However, at no time, ever, was it carried out so efficiently, so “scientifically.” The actions of October 7th by Hamas were horrible and appalling, but they cannot begin to approximate what the then most civilized nation in the world did to the Jews and other minority people. 

    • #13
  14. Matt Bartle Member
    Matt Bartle
    @MattBartle

    jzdro (View Comment):
    How were the other tourists?

    I didn’t notice anyone behaving disrespectfully.

    • #14
  15. The Reticulator Member
    The Reticulator
    @TheReticulator

    My wife and I have visited Poland, but we haven’t visited the Nazi concentration camp sites. We may do another visit assuming both of us are able to continue traveling, but may not visit concentration camp sites even then.  If I visit one it might be the Majdanek site near Lublin, and that’s because I learned yesterday that one of my +great-grandmothers from the early-mid 1700s had the maiden name of Majdanek.  I haven’t had much time to research it further.

    I also learned a year ago that a younger brother of a great-grandmother died in a Nazi concentration camp.   I knew her youngest brother and stayed at his house during my brief career as a migrant farm laborer; this brother was a little older.  (Those were my great-grandmother’s half-brothers.  There was a difference of 30+ years in birth dates between her and the one I knew.)  It wasn’t because this brother was trying to protect Jews or anything heroic like that.  He was trying to appeal to the Nazis that they should leave his farm alone because he was German, too, and I guess it didn’t end well.  I have no idea which concentration camp, or if it was really a place that is generally considered to be a concentration camp.  A couple days ago I checked a database of those who died in Nazi concentration camps and his name wasn’t in it under any of the spellings that I tried.

    My wife and I are interested in the history of the Holocaust in Poland.  We went to Poland mainly to visit places of family history–all in German villages in different parts of what is now Poland.  After I finally learned where my grandmother’s village really had been on the Vistula River, I scratched Warsaw from our itinerary, but not completely. I kept a couple of days worth of my hotel reservation there, and we walked along the ghetto wall and visited a remnant that still stands. 

    I can use the excuse that I am interested not only in the culmination of evil, but how it started.  A few years ago I read a book by an American Jew who later in life took an interest in his Jewish background and went back to learn the story of his family in Nasielsk, which is a little north of Warsaw and straight east from my grandmother’s village.  I now want to visit, but don’t expect it to be easy to walk along the streets described in the book, where ancestors of the people who live there now allowed terrible things to happen to their neighbors and also took part in them.   But it’s important to confront the reality of such things happening. 

    Before yesterday I had never heard of a Majdanek concentration camp.  I had finally subscribed to Ancestry.com earlier this week to see if I could find more information than I had found on MyHeritage.com, which subscription I had allowed to lapse a couple of years ago.  In unsystematic searches I have found considerable information on both my mother’s and father’s side that I didn’t have before.  In tracing this great-grandmother’s family I was surprised and pleased to learn how many generations back her ancestry had been traced.  And then I saw the surname Majdanek, which to me looked Slavic rather than German.  Historians of the relationships among Germans, Poles, and Jews in Poland have said that intermarriage between Germans and Poles was not common, and this was the first possible example in my family that I had come up with.  And then I learned about the concentration camp of that name, and the fact that the Majdanek name is still to be found in Poland and England.  But even more instances of that name are in Israel.  So does this mean I have a bit of Polish ancestry and/or Jewish ancestry?  Hard to say.  The first name of this  +great-grandmother was Gertrude, and that doesn’t sound very Polish or Jewish to me. So whatever connection there may be probably goes back even further than that, and that’s as far back as Ancestry.com researchers have been able to go.  When people were required to adopt surnames they often picked the name of a place they had come from, so maybe there is no DNA connection at all with other Majdaneks.

     

    • #15
  16. GeezerBob Coolidge
    GeezerBob
    @GeezerBob

    I had the same experience a few years ago. Poland was very enjoyable, but then there is Auschwitz… My thoughts. https://pepperandvinegar.wordpress.com/2019/08/30/poland/

    It is nearly impossible to convey the full impact…

    • #16
  17. Brian J Bergs Coolidge
    Brian J Bergs
    @BrianBergs

    The Reticulator (View Comment):

    In tracing this great-grandmother’s family I was surprised and pleased to learn how many generations back her ancestry had been traced. And then I saw the surname Majdanek, which to me looked Slavic rather than German. Historians of the relationships among Germans, Poles, and Jews in Poland have said that intermarriage between Germans and Poles was not common, and this was the first possible example in my family that I had come up with. And then I learned about the concentration camp of that name, and the fact that the Majdanek name is still to be found in Poland and England. But even more instances of that name are in Israel.

    Getting off-thread here but I find this interesting as DNA evidence (through ancestry.com) shows that my paternal grandmother’s family who came from Pomerania and West Prussia had a lot of Slavic genes (perhaps 40%).  They spoke only German,  were German Lutherans, considered themselves ethnically German, and the cities they came from were German until the post WWII ethnic cleansing.  They also had a very Slavic sounding name (Klitzke). So I concluded there must have been a good deal of German/Polish intermarriage because of the DNA evidence.  I even found a 2nd wife of one g-g-g grandfather (not my line) was definitely Polish, remained Catholic and she and most of their children eventually immigrated into the Chicago area (lots of DNA hits there).

     

     

    • #17
  18. The Reticulator Member
    The Reticulator
    @TheReticulator

    Brian J Bergs (View Comment):
    Getting off-thread here but I find this interesting as DNA evidence (through ancestry.com) shows that my paternal grandmother’s family who came from Pomerania and West Prussia had a lot of Slavic genes (perhaps 40%).  They spoke only German,  were German Lutherans, considered themselves ethnically German, and the cities they came from were German until the post WWII ethnic cleansing.  They also had a very Slavic sounding name (Klitzke). So I concluded there must have been a good deal of German/Polish intermarriage because of the DNA evidence.  I even found a 2nd wife of one g-g-g grandfather (not my line) was definitely Polish, remained Catholic and she and most of their children eventually immigrated into the Chicago area (lots of DNA hits there).

    I have more on this topic, but yeah, it gets completely away from the topic of the concentration camps, so maybe there will be a good opportunity to discuss it later somewhere else.  

    • #18
  19. Miffed White Male Member
    Miffed White Male
    @MiffedWhiteMale

    The Reticulator (View Comment):
    Before yesterday I had never heard of a Majdanek concentration camp. 

    There were several camps that were built, fulfilled their purpose and then torn down by the Nazis well before the war ended – Treblinka and Sobibor are two examples off the top of my head.

     

    Last year I read the book Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder.  It’s a tough read that took a lot out of me.  It’s about both the Russians and the Germans in the contested areas between the two countries, with a great deal on the Ukrainan famine of the 20s and the Holocaust of the 40s.

    One minor note in it really stuck with me, describing one POW camp where conditions were so bad that prisoners submitted written requests to the camp commander requesting they be executed..

    • #19
  20. Matt Bartle Member
    Matt Bartle
    @MattBartle

    One more comment on our trip . . . 

    When in Warsaw we stayed in Hotel Bristol, a magnificent old building. So how did this structure survive WWII, when so much of Warsaw was destroyed? 

    Well, because the Nazis used it. Adolph Hitler stayed there.

    Another weird thing to contemplate.

    • #20
  21. The Reticulator Member
    The Reticulator
    @TheReticulator

    Matt Bartle (View Comment):

    One more comment on our trip . . .

    When in Warsaw we stayed in Hotel Bristol, a magnificent old building. So how did this structure survive WWII, when so much of Warsaw was destroyed?

    Well, because the Nazis used it. Adolph Hitler stayed there.

    Another weird thing to contemplate.

    Right next to the presidential palace, it seems.  We walked past it twice without paying any attention to it or realizing it was a hotel. At least I didn’t. Mrs R notices some things that I miss. The one we stayed at was almost a mile away, and it, too, was one of the few buildings that survived the war and the uprisings.  

    • #21
  22. Matt Bartle Member
    Matt Bartle
    @MattBartle

    The Reticulator (View Comment):
    Right next to the presidential palace, it seems. 

    Yes, we walked by it, and its armed guards who are always out front, several times.

    It made me wonder about the protocol of walking right by armed guards. Do you make eye contact and say, “Good morning”? Somehow that didn’t feel like the right thing to do. They have a serious job and are presumably serious about it. Probably not into pleasantries. So we walked by as if they weren’t there, which felt awkward.

    • #22
  23. Sisyphus Member
    Sisyphus
    @Sisyphus

    Matt Bartle (View Comment):

    The Reticulator (View Comment):
    Right next to the presidential palace, it seems.

    Yes, we walked by it, and its armed guards who are always out front, several times.

    It made me wonder about the protocol of walking right by armed guards. Do you make eye contact and say, “Good morning”? Somehow that didn’t feel like the right thing to do. They have a serious job and are presumably serious about it. Probably not into pleasantries. So we walked by as if they weren’t there, which felt awkward.

    That’s pretty much the protocol. Stay out of reach with nothing more than a curt nod if that and keep going. Obviously, if the nice armed men want your attention, it will happen.

    • #23
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