…better throw some shoes upon those feet

[There’s an entry before this with more food and fewer Nazis. Maybe you want to read it first.]

Before all that though, on Friday morning, we took a bus to Auschwitz-Birkenau, the biggest of the Nazi concentration camps. (I didn’t really need to clarify that, right? People know that, right? Not just Jewish girls who spent disproportionate amounts of their childhood reading young adult novels about Jewish girls during the war?)

And it’s big. And most of it is still there. Like the barbed wire fences, and the big brick barracks, and the wall where they shot people, and the gate at the entrance that says “Work brings freedom” in German (in case we didn’t think they were bastards enough already). And there’s one crematorium still in the smaller part of the camp, but the main ones are gone, because the Nazis blew them up as they retreated in the hope of destroying the evidence. And then there are the things found there that have been set up as exhibits: the piles of suitcases, the piles of shoes, the piles of toothbrushes, of pots and pans, of eyeglasses, of human hair. And there are drawings by survivors of what it was like inside the camp, and there are photos of the liberation, and there is record upon record of name upon name and date of birth and date of entrance and date of death.

It’s hard to see, but in a different way than I thought it would be. You walk through with a tour guide who speaks very matter-of-factly, as I suppose you’d have to if you were going to repeat that information every day. It’s just a little surreal to stand in a room of bare cement walls and hear, “Up to seven thousand people could be killed here in a day. Now we’ll walk to the left…” And you’d expect to feel it. You’d think something would be different in the air, you’d think your feet would be able to feel death through the ground. But it’s not like that. It’s just empty.

And there were pangs of feeling, like when I saw my grandmother’s first name printed large on one of the hundreds of suitcases that people were told to mark clearly so they’d be sure to get them back. But mostly I was surprised at how almost detached I felt. Mostly I was concerned because the tour was for the most part outside and it was three hours long and I thought my toes were about to fall off. And then I felt guilty, because who the fuck am I to think it’s cold at Auschwitz?

I think it’s just too much. There’s too much of everything there to be able to take in and comprehend and synthesize all at once. I think it started to filter through a few hours after we left, once we were back in Krakow. It was only then, sitting in a couch in the hostel in front of MTV Europe, that my brain started to process what exactly I’d seen, and that I started to feel the way I thought I should have felt while I was there. And it wasn’t even sad so much as quietly frightened.

When I got back to Prague I called my parents and I told them about Krakow. And I told them about Auschwitz-Birkenau. And because I wasn’t sure, I asked my dad if we knew where my grandmother’s family ended up, and he said, “Auschwitz-Birkenau.”

Here’s what I wish, though. When I was in San Diego with my family, my dad and sister and I went to their big museum and saw, among other things, an exhibition of medieval torture devices used by the like of the Spanish Inquisition. And it was a dirty feeling, for the most part, because we were looking at pieces of metal that had killed people in awful, awful ways out of, what, morbid curiosity? But at the end of the exhibit they had a display about torture as it exists today, and where you can get more information about it, and what you could do to help in places where it still goes on, and just the presence of that information changed the exhibit from sick entertainment into educational opportunity.

And at Auschwitz they had quotations on display about how horrible everything was that the camp stood for, and they had the obligatory “Those who don’t learn from history are destined to repeat it” line. But I wish that somewhere, anywhere, I had seen “Genocide still happens.” Because yes, it’s compelling enough to know that a million people died where you stand, and yes, they deserve to be recognized and remembered and mourned in their own right, especially if some of them were yours. But it didn’t end with European Jews, and if the feeling of desperate impotence that a place like Auschwitz produces were then urged toward something that actually has some chance of being productive now, how cool would that be? Why go see it otherwise?

Was that preachy enough? I hope so. I can’t manage too much more.

Anyway, I’m back in Prague now, and it’s warmer, and I swear I’ll start waking up in time for my classes this week. And next weekend I’m going to Budapest, and at the end of the month I’m meeting the roomies in London, and for Spring Break I might go to Transylvania and/or Istanbul, and I’m going to spend all my money on travel and return to New York in May homeless and jobless and destitute and I might have to live in the library, but oh my god, you guys, I’m in Central Europe. Isn’t this magic?