Polska

I left early on a Monday morning after a road win the night before, driving 30 minutes before realizing my team hadn’t given me back my passport after our last FIBA cup game. After a frantic phone call, I was assured that the borders are now open and that passports are unnecessary. Sure enough, one can now drive through most of Europe without border control. The only sign of the change in country is some deserted communist check point that a few months ago contained government employees sitting around drinking Nescafe.

I had all my road maps set out and cruised through Polish country towns until I saw the sign for Oswechim, which I learned is the real name of the infamous place we know as Auschwitz. I parked the car and walked into the museum, intent on spending the remaining opening hours immersing myself in the nightmare of the haunted complex. After a minute of walking through the museum, I realized I was in way over my head and immediately joined a tour group. Definitely a good decision.

People from all over the world were crammed into a bus, colored name tags according to native language, and shuttled to Birkenau. We started with a tour of the grounds, saw the latrine where concrete holes were set up, one next to the other, like orderly swiss cheese, balking at the proximity of each unseperated facility. The first stop and I’m already cringing at the thought of rubbing elbows with someone while defecating. The facilities turned out to be the least of their problems however. The guide elaborated on the queues and the limits of use (twice a day) and how they couldn’t go to the bathroom at night. For any offense of course they could be beaten or punished in horrible, inhumane ways. Remind me never to complain about Turkish toilets again.

Then we entered the next wooden building, built long and meant for the holding of 50 horses. Instead, hundreds of people were crammed into bunk beds, sometimes as many as twelve, skinny, starving bodies sharing a single bed. As people died, others moved up the bunks in order to get away from the mud and rat infested floors. The heaters never worked and blankets and clothing were scarce. It was a beautiful sunny day but the chill in the air was a faint reminder of normal winter days.

We then went up to the watch tower looking out over the acreage where millions of people lived and died over the course of five infamous years. We saw the remnants of the gas chambers and crematoriums, destroyed by the Nazis to hide the evidence as the Allied troups advanced. We stood in the exact spot where SS officers watched the trains enter the camp for the first analysis.

I’ve read a fair amount about the atrocities commited at Auschwitz/Birkenau yet actually seeing the remnants of life, feeling the cold on my face, witnessing the places people slept and ate and went to the bathroom, certainly put a new level of reality on the text I’ve read. The sheer number of people brought and tortured and killed in the very same spots I was standing, and walking, and taking pictures was a bit like standing in a deserted cemetery; one needn’t believe in ghosts to feel the emptiness of a place where human energy is no longer.

There were two things that struck me the most. Primarily, I was fascinated by the organization of it all. The Nazis for all their lack of humanity, were not stupid. They started by deceiving a country, continued by holding secrets from the world, and continually and systematically killed millions of people, most of them unaware of what was happening to them until the very last gasp in the gas chambers. People disrobed willingly, expecting showers instead of cyanide. They devised new, economic, and efficient modes of death through suffucation, disposed of bodies in record numbers, and stripped bodies of gold, teeth, and hair. They experiemented on humans in the name of progress, and organized a hierarchy where power hungry officers lost their conscious. All this in a modern age, in a country and world of literate, intelligent people where we have access to information and like to think we have a collective conscious on what is right and wrong.

But I knew all this. I’d heard the numbers, I’d read about the political prisoners, the Soviet prisoners of war, the ‘Final Solution’ for the Jews of Europe. I knew that people were denied justice, that any offense could bring on the firing squad. I’d read accounts of the hunger the victims faced in the camp, how a single piece of bread could make people kill or die but that in other cases, people sacrificied themselves in rape or death to save another. I know how the Holocaust started, how the Nazis played up the fear of Communism and the feeling that German morality was losing its footing. I know that it started slowly, the Nazis picked on the least powerful people, the criminals the defects, the dregs of society and slowly moved their way up, taking control of the courts and the media along the way, until their power was ubiquitous and unstoppable.

The second thing that really touched me was the depth of evil. It wasn’t just the amount of people that died or the horrible conditions they lived in or even the brutality they faced. All this was staggering of course but it wasn’t new. What I didn’t know, or expect, or hadn’t let myself feel before was the lack of humanity. I really felt the absence of empathy. I was in a space that held the memories; a place where the very thing that makes us human had disappeared. I remember reading a victim’s account of Auschwitz and I understand more now why he said that regardless of all he had faced, he would never want to trade places with an SS officer because while he might die, at least he still had a soul.

Humans are a mass of contradicting emotions, we can love and hate and be filled with passion in an instant. We can be vulnerable and strong all at once. Our minds are pliable and malleable and capable of incredible changes. In the correct circumstances, we can transform ourselves, amend who we are and what we believe. This is our greatest strength, seen in the adaptability of the victims, and our greatest weakness, exemplified by the SS officers and Kapos. But still, I like to think that humans really are different than other animals, that at our core we connect with other humans, that there is a soft spot in each of us that hurts when we see others hurting. So I thought, as I walked down the sunny dirt roads of Auschwitz, that this place not only remembers the dead, it remembers this phenomenon; people didn’t just lose their lives here, people lost their humanity.

I tried to hold onto this thought, tried to feel that spot in my heart to convince myself that it is real. But slowly my hope in the goodness of the world started to waver. It was the deviousness of the acts. . Its why we punish premeditated murder more than murder done in the heat of the moment. There is a deeper seeded evil to killing when you’ve thought it out. They had the time to stop, to analyze what they were doing, to let their conscious step in. Instead, the thought up more ways to be deceptive. For example, the Nazis tried to convince Jews they were leaving their homes for a new life, even offered fake ownership papers to new houses. Then after stacking them like livestock into trains, cold and thirsty and starving, for up to two weeks, they separated them when they arrived, men from women and children. Then the twisted parody of judgement day began. The SS officers playing God, choosing in an instant who would die immediately and who would die slowly from forced labour, freezing to death, exhaustion, and malnutrition. Many headed directly to the gas chambers, women holding onto babies, young children excited to be outside, running excitedly to their death, men standing around talking, thinking they were headed to the showers. I saw big black and white pictures of this; children were running to die.

The museum really focuses on the small traces of life left behind. Victims brought with them the things they thought they would need for their new homes; shoes and shaving kits, eyeglasses and toothbrushes, pots and cooking utensils. The museum had huge rooms separated by glass filled with inconsequential things, things made only important because the people that had packed them with care and hope and trepidation were never able to use their cracked blue water vase or wooden comb. I saw piles and piles of prosthetic legs and back braces, their crippled owners no doubt killed immediately, the only part of them they left behind. I saw women’s hair stripped from freshly dead bodies, sold to wig makers and textile factories, preserved by the museum and place ominously behind glass. It was haunting to see the little signs of life, proof that
the people that perished had lives before Auschwitz, normal lives with innocent, diurnal tasks.

Then we came to the room filled with suitcases, names and birthdates written across the leather. Our guide pointed out the suitcase of a girl named Sarah. It read “orphan” in German and had a birthdate that made her no older than eight years old. I imagined a little eight year old girl in a dress, holding onto a suitcase bigger than her, scared and alone and certainly sent immediately to die since she didn’t make the age cut off. I started to tear up. When I saw the baby clothes, and tiny innocent shoes, taken from gas chamber victims and given to SS officers children, I teared up even more.. I suppose it was then that I felt my world shake a little, like everything I had known or thought or believed in, was threatened. I know war brings out the worst in people, and I know that brainwashing and group pressure make people do horrible things. But killing children? Cyaniding them while still in their mothers arms, or worse, killing families by firing squad, making the parents watch as their children were shot first. I can’t seem to grasp this complexity of the conscious; the SS officers committed mass murder at work, returning home with new presents for their kids, taken off the corpses of Jewish children.

I continued to tour the grounds of Auschwitz, saw the one meter by one meter concrete room where four people were forced to stand together overnight and then work 11 hours the next day; I stopped outside the check point and listened to stories of roll call taking 19 hours as people with thin clothing on dropped dead from the cold, myself shivering in my new ski jacket;I stopped in front of the wall where executions were carried out, the covered windows of the human experiment building watching over the courtyard; I walked through the first gas chamber and crematorium, where they would park a truck outside with the engine running until the screams stopped. The first gassing wasn’t estimated correctly and two days after the cyanide was administered, there were still people breathing, suffocating to their death slowly. I could go on and on but I won’t. Its enough to know that humans are capable of such atrocities, that that little soft spot in our hearts is not infallible, that we must always nurture the empathy within us. And so, in the most hopeless of places, I walked out with a strange feeling; that all that is bad in the world, and all that is good in the world can exist in the same place or in the same person, and that it is up to us to remember this scope of human potential and choose to fuel the good in all of us.

I got back in my car after the tour, a bit overwhelmed, unable to quite process all I had just seen. I had an hour drive into Krakow, which gave me some time to sort my thoughts and transition back to reality. I got into the city about dinner time, found a place to park, stumbled upon my hostel, and started to explore. I was staying in the heart of the old town so I hit the cobblestone street with a renewed energy. It was dark out so the enormous plaza was all lit up, a huge market building in the center glowed, and the church and pubs and restaurants glistened in the cold night air. There were people everywhere, walking home after work or headed to meet friends. I was hungry so I stepped down into a basement pub, drank Polish beer and ate tomatoe soup, savoring every bite, reminded that food is something to be grateful for.

Later that night I headed to the Sheraton bar to have a drink, excited to relax in a swanky spot. I ended up sampling vodka with some English couple and sharing West coast stories with a 35 year old Apple computer retiree, traveling around the world to decide on his next career. Must be tough.

Tuesday morning I woke up and hit the ground running, intent on finding a paper and a coffee shop. For some reason the former proved to be difficult and I could only muster up a Krakow news but did stumble upon an ecletic café with old wooden tables, a loft and students sitting around studying. I had a wonderful cappuccino and almond croissant as I read about the Polish economy and emigration problems. Then I walked down through the Jewish Quarter, old winding streets with houses built on top and around each other and finally made it to the enormous and beautiful Castle. I toured the outside but opted out of the intense thourough tour, a bit worn out from the day before. I felt I’d done my duty as an informed world citizen for one weekend. I’m a bit of a contradiction when it comes to traveling; Historically significant sites must be balanced with cafes and random conversations with locals.

Since I was on vacation my afternoon consisted of nothing much prodtuctive. I ate duck soup in a beautiful Italian restaurant, napped, and read my biography of Dorothy Parker. I made it out of my hotel again, found a bar with a USA today and savored every bit of news over hot chocolate. The table next to me was filled with family members of the bar owner, all of them from Minnesota, so we shared stories for awhile before it was time to get ready for dinner.

I had big plans for the night. I showered and dressed and decided on another beautiful Italian restaurant around the corner where I sat by myself, drank red wine and ate steak. There is quite a unique sense of freedom and autonomy that comes from eating alone in a nice restaurant. The food was fabulous and so was my book for company.

I returned to the bar where I drank South African red wine and started talking to a white haired Professor of Architecture, sipping on jagermeister. Since he had taught in America, his English was great and we spend the whole night chatting about life and love and everything in between. It was somewhat of a relief to meet a foreigner that had so many good things to say about America. He was more in love with it than I am. Sadly, mostly these days my conversations consist of how stupid Bush is or how we need to stop taking sides with Israel. Rarely do I meet someone that not only knows American intimately but also has good things to say about it. Seems like people either romanticize it and still hold on to believing the streets are paved with gold, or bash our arrogance. Since he was about three times my age, he’s spent most of his life living under communisim, which is why he appreciated America as a land of economic freedom. I took the opportunity to rack his memories about what life had been like under communism and he laughed when I just couldn’t believe what I was hearing. He said that as an American, there is no way I could ever imagine life without choices, without individual property, without the freedom to make my life how I want it. He spoke of after WWII when the government took everything, individual apartments, corner grocery stores, and then limited consumer goods to few items they approved. I just can’t grasp the idea of a government taking away something I had earned and paid for. He loved that I spoke of doing exactly what I want career wise and reminded me that my culture has a lot of do with that belief in myself and my ablilities. Americans bleive they can do anything.

Soon we moved on to other things; his marriage, his affair, my zodiac sign. He was full of life wisdom, saying things like most major disagreements in our lives come from two places; fights between the sexes and fights between the generations, none of which understand each other. He knew way too much about what kind of man I need and said quite plainly that I have high expectations for life and therefore it might take me awhile to find someone suitable. Then he said he understood aries women because his lover is one. We are difficult women, both easy and hard to love. Such wonderful company to have in dark bar on a late, cold night in Eastern Europe.

The next morning I walked around the city one last time, finally found my International Herald Tribune and snuggled into a Nescafe cafe for a long morning. I found the parking lot with the old guy sitting in his booth, the same man I had negotiated with in Polish two days before, both of us laughing and agreeing on a price. Then it was time to head back south, to my little town nestled in the mountains of Slovakia. Wonderful trip, always nice to return home….