Notes on a visit to Auschwitz, January 2006
One of mine: excerpt from a Myspace post from January 10th, 2006
“... The second day was our scheduled trip to Oswiecim (meaning blessed) and Brzezinka (silver birch), more commonly referred to as Auschwitz and Birkenau. We travelled there by taxi in the company of a voluble and friendly driver called Casimir. A mine of information, he was eager to help yet careful to allow us to shape the day as we wished and to be with our thoughts and feelings.
I don’t propose to write a detailed account of the day at the camps: I may produce a presentation at a later date. I can say that no amount of reading and study, or exposure to the images with which we are perhaps over-familiar, can prepare one for the experience of standing on that ground. The two camps are a couple of kilometres apart: most visitors focus on Auschwitz I since this is where most of the relics and artefacts are displayed. Birkenau, sometimes referred to as Auschwitz II, is the death factory where approximately 1,500,000 people were exterminated and burned.
What I recall now is the silence of the place, as if human bestiality banished the birds. The only sound was the cotton wool scrunch of snow under foot as we plodded through this charnel house. There were one or two damascene horrors that brought me up sharply, all preparations notwithstanding. An example from each camp might suffice:
At Auschwitz I, climbing a stairwell in one of the barrack houses, I was aware of the intense smell of mothballs. At the top of the stair was a large room, with filtered light from windows creating a startling effect. As I stepped into the room, I naturally looked left. There was a glass case running the length of the wall. Behind the glass was a pile of human hair. I say pile but that’s inadequate; there was two metric tons of hair – grey, auburn, brown and blonde tresses. The enormity of it, its incongruity, made it look like an abstract art installation. It was difficult to process what I was seeing because I had no yardstick to measure it by. A howl of anguish is difficult to spell.
Another of those moments that overturn expectations occurred when first set eyes on the iconic gatehouse at Birkenau, seen countless times in grainy monochrome photographs as an ominous black building on the horizon. The long, low building with its squat central tower sat in a desolate field of snow, its maw gaping openly for the next transport. In my mind’s eye that building was a terrible shorthand for desolation and extremity. When I saw it, the swirling black giddiness was real enough but, of course, the building is not black; it is that ochre, sulphur, russet and blue-grey colour we euphemistically call red brick. For the first time a nightmare was in colour.
The camp itself is vast. On the left-hand side, the women’s camp – low brick-built block houses in rows. To the right, a limitlessly gaunt clearing with only the brick chimneys of the burned wooden barracks crying to heaven for vengeance. They stretched on and on… On the horizon ahead lay the dynamited ruins of the gas chambers and crematoria.
That evening, we were in need of some cultural uplift. We went to a concert of baroque chamber music in one of the city’s churches. It was then that the tears started: layer upon layer of experience – from the day just ending and from days long past and widely scattered, welled up and found expression in salty tears. Vivaldi and Corelli, an exuberantly baroque church, and a day spent sifting a charnel house…”
