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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.
Discussion (23)
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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.
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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.
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And the ISIS-made and Hamas-made videos, etc.
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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.
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I don't think I could go . My eyes watered while reading your post . However , thank you Matt for your report .
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