Auschwitz

From Gianfranco:

When I was younger, I learned about the Holocaust and Auschwitz in school, or from history programs on TV, or in books. I knew about the millions of Jews and thousands of others who were killed in concentration camps by the Nazis during World War II.

It was always something I learned about many years after the fact, safe at home in the United States. Maybe I might have seen a movie about the terror of the SS, or maybe I was told about Anne Frank and her family's attempts to hide from the Germans, but if I learned anything about the actual systematic extermination of an entire people, it was always at a high level. There was gas and cremations, death and ashes. Lots of people died. Then the Americans saved the day, and World War II was over. Now we can study the Marshall Plan and move on to mathematics and art.

So when we took a trip to visit Auschwitz, I didn't know what to expect.

At first glance, it's a giant military camp. Barracks, buildings, logistics. Barbed wires and gates. Rules and regulations.

We had a guide take us through the gate and into a few of the buildings, which had been converted into exhibits. There were many photos and documents since the Nazis kept very good records. We saw images of people arriving by train car, being separated into the able and the useless, and wearing their prison garb. We saw statues. We saw cases and rooms which held piles of hairbrushes, eyeglasses, shoes, suitcases, prosthetics...basically, anything of value that the Nazis could take from the arriving prisoners. The stacks of baby shoes were some of the most depressing images I've ever seen.

And then, shortly before we were to leave to see Auschwitz II, which is the larger nearby camp known as Birkenau, we were taken inside a large, dark room with a few points of light in the ceiling. We were told that those holes were where the Nazis dropped the Zyklon-B poison gas into the room once the Jews were locked in.

And that's when I remembered that I wasn't at a mere museum. I wasn't seeing exhibits made to look authentic. I wasn't seen props created by experts who knew how to make things look real. I was standing in the room where people died, hour after hour, systematically and efficiently. I was actually in a gas chamber in Auschwitz. I was actually seeing where bodies were burnt once they were cleared out of the chamber to make room for the next victims.

I once read that the human mind is naturally inclined to solve problems. The entire time I was there and the bus ride back, I was constantly trying to solve the Holocaust: how could something so horrible on such a large scale have been possible? With so many people involved at so many junctions, how is it possible that resistance wasn't strong enough to prevent it, slow it down, stop it? How could the Nazis working the camp live with themselves knowing what they were doing?

How does a Holocaust happen in this world? I kept thinking that there were so many moving parts that had to be working perfectly in order for it to occur. Surely there must have been at least a key person or two who realized not only what was happening but also could do something about it? Surely there had to be someone who successfully fought back and inspired others to do so? Surely it was unthinkable to so many people?

But then I think about how different things are, living decades after the fact. Today we know a Holocaust happened, and so humanity on the whole is probably more capable of knowing how to prevent it or stop it. Back then, who knew it was possible? Who thought that keeping their heads down and keeping quiet wasn't the best thing to do?

Today if terrorists tried to use a plane as a weapon, passengers wouldn't let them succeed in their plans because we have the example of at least one set of passengers on September 11th. On that day, however, the attacks were not expected and there was no precedent for what to do about such an attempt in recent memory.

So I guess it's easy to ask accusatorily in hindsight "Humanity, how can you let something like this happen?" when referring to the Holocaust, but back then, in a time when phone calls were expensive, when the closest thing to the Internet was a set of cables for transmitting short text messages, when a multi-front war was being fought on a scale larger than anyone has ever seen, it was a different, more innocent time. After all, the people back then didn't have a Holocaust-like event, on such a scale, to refer back to.

It's still difficult, though, to not ask those questions as you walk along the train tracks that brought so many people to their death, as you touch the wooden slats where so many slept and cried and suffered and died, as you pass the evenly spaced, oh-so-intentional buildings. How did this happen? And what is happening today that we're not seeing, or refusing to see?