Auschwitz/Burkenau

Auschwitz/Burkenau

I will keep my comments brief, as there is little I can add to what is already widely known. No words can explain the immensity of the horror and insanity involved.

From a purely touristic point of view, we found the smaller Auschwitz camp tour to be exhaustively informative (we were guided by a woman who clearly felt very deeply about what she was describing, but her tour took over two hours on a very hot day). With hoards of tourists just like us milling around in our brightly colored summer vacation clothes, digital cameras and bottled water, it took away much of the solemnity of the site. If I were to do it again, I would come later in the day when tours are optional and it is less busy.

Birkenau, however - ten times the size, and purely a camp of death – was big enough and stark enough that a couple of hundred tourists didn’t alter the effect. Walking along the train tracks you felt the need to weep but it doesn’t happen. There is no sense to it all. The immensity is too much. Without something tangible to focus on, the tears never come.

In Auschwitz there are several walls of photos of prisoners, the date they entered and the date they died. Early on, they took photos to identify prisoners in case of escape. Later, they stopped bothering because after a few weeks in camp, none of the prisoners would be recognizable anyway. Many are older and look as if they have already lived a good part of their lives. But one photo I noticed was of an attractive young woman who looked as if, in another time and place, she could have been passing me on the sidewalk. She entered camp in late November, 1942 and died just six weeks later. It doesn’t say how. It doesn’t really matter. It doesn’t say why. How could it?...