Dragon's Teeth

It's taken me a while to truly gather my thoughts about Auschwitz and Birkenau; even while I was there, I didn't actually know what I was feeling. All I knew was that the platitudes that people so oft utter after visiting such places have no true meaning or bearing on the effect of the most famous of extermination engines. Getting off the small van after seeing the camps, I heard many people saying things like "That was incredible" or "What an amazing experience." It's not that I'm angry with these people for saying what they know they are supposed to say after visiting the camp, but I feel that to not actually examine your feelings is to detract from the significance of the place. And no one who really pays attention can walk out of Auschwitz and say it was incredible or amazing; after some introspection, I was a bit surprised to find that all of the things we are supposed to feel are not necessarily part of the subtle emotional tide that creeps over your frame as you follow the railroad tracks.

Auschwitz itself is a concentration camp, meaning that it was not meant for the mass exterminations that the slaughtering camps, like Birkenau and Treblinka, were engineered for. True, it does have a crematorium, a gallows, and a wall of death, but all of these devices were meant for more small scale elimination of those the Nazis felt had no right to live. Walking through its tree lined streets, I felt no connection to the place. In my mind I was struggling to rectify this; I had read Night in 10th grade and wept until there was nothing left. Shouldn't I be feeling something?

I had watched a very graphic short film about the camps on the journey out of Cracow and had been overcome with an urge of self-destruction. I wanted to feel pain! I desired in my heart to have my soul crushed by the bastion of death, to know the same tragic wisdom of the millions who passed through the gates of freedom, to be irrevocably scarred, to walk from the camp with the marks that never leave. But when I first saw the sign bearing black, rusting irony, there was nothing there. The buildings had no punishment for me. The cells couldn't tell me their tales. The gallows couldn't shorten my breath and the crematorium remained cold and stagnant. I had come wanting to be tortured by memories, but Auschwitz seemed determined to keep them from me.

We left that place and travelled the short distance to the sister camp of Birkenau, the massive, extermination counterpart. Approaching the gates to this camp, merely red brick and iron bars, I knew that this would be different. I stared through those bars down the train tracks to the end of the camp, where the ruins of crematoriums 4 and 5 were, and I became very peaceful. I had spent the time before entering the camps in a state of violent internal rage and had wandered through Auschwitz in a state of confusion, as if I had somehow travelled to the wrong place. None of it made any associative sense, but I feel like I had finally figured out how to "be" within the walls of the Final Solution, and that the camp itself was now allowing my soul a connection.

I separated myself from the group as we walked in, which turned out to be an excellent move. If you don't know too much about the camps, I might recommend taking a tour, but otherwise, just get a map; you get a much better opportunity to listen to the wind as it whistles through the grass.

Looking down at the whole camp from a watchtower at the entrance, a feeling of bitter irony rose against the peace within my mind. Birkenau is like a broken skeleton, emaciated from its own burning hunger and dashed by its terrible ambition. It is something to be laughed at. To the left and right are systemically placed chimneys and piles of brick, marking the houses of destruction that the Nazis themselves had to destroy as they were leaving, in an attempt to erase their high crimes. Birkenau, from above is a parody of both life and death, because, in the end, it could achieve neither and now it lies, frozen, a stillborn dream of glory and ashy remains of the heart of darkness from which we all flee. My face became long, in the fashion of a critiquing artist, and my eyes gazed out in disdain, as if I had no taste for this paradox of beginning/end.

But, the ground level was another story. As I mentioned before, you can hear the wind as it blows through the grass. The camp itself is beautiful; it reminds me of the countryside I used to wander through as a child in Texas. Clouds shift back and forth, scattering individual rays down upon the pathways and fields, briefly illuminating some ruin before sweeping across a wide plain of vivid green. That peaceful feeling returned with bolstered strength, and I felt a little like a hobbit at the end of The Lord of the Rings. After much destruction and pain, one finds that there is still beauty in the world, and that this beauty, coupled with the joy one feels when looking upon it, is exponentially more important than letting your smile recede under the weight of the past. We use places like this to remember our mistakes, because they are mistakes of a most grievous kind, and humanity shall never evolve unless we can overcome the desires that lead us to make them. But there is another reason we remember places like these. They are a foil for our own lives by which the wonderful nature of our existence is revealed. This is at least what I felt. I walked out of the camp, knowing that there were so many who were not as lucky as I, not with a smile on my face, but the shadow of one in any case, and a peace in my heart.

So, if you go to Auschwitz and Birkenau in standard masochist's fashion as I first thought I should, do not be surprised if the camp keeps its feelings to itself. The place is too powerful to simply acquiesce to the demanding sightseer, who wants instant emotional gratification. You will end up having to create your own sense of what you saw, and this memory will be dry and have no meaning. But if you walk amongst the crumbling monuments of millions and try to listen to the whistling grass, the camp may give you something that you did not expect, but something that is real, so real in fact that you may burst with the strength of it.

I looked back at my pictures after the trip, and found that I didn't really like any of them, except for one picture, where a single twist of barbed wire stands in focus against the long, iron fence. There is a sense of smallness that brings about the true feelings of a place like Auschwitz.