Auschwitz: Dispatch from Hell

I spent yesterday in Hell. At Auschwitz and Birkenau, 90 minutes outside of Krakow, Poland. A day trip.

What to say?

Brilliant writers have struggled to capture what Auschwitz is — what it represents to the human race (the darkest, most horrifying moment of modern history), what it yielded (the near complete and total annihilation of Europe’s Jews), what it means today (the yardstick against which all other evils are measured). Primo Levi, Tadeusz Borowski, Viktor Frankl, Elie Wiesel, Anne Frank. They’ve written. They’ve asked why. They’ve tried to make sense of the senseless.

I cannot say anything new.

But.

What I can do — and what I must do, for this is nothing short of a compulsion — is record the experience. Bear witness as a Jew. One of the lucky ones whose family did not choose to remain in Europe but, rather, fled at the start of the 20th century.

I went alone to Auschwitz. And I chose not to take a tour. Instead, I had the “guide book” and I followed the route. It isn’t difficult. You enter the gates of Hell beneath the “Arbeit Macht Frei” sign — talk about a sense of humor — and you follow the path. You can’t go astray; the barbed wire keeps you in line.

I carried a camera. A real one, not my iPhone. A Nikon D7100 DSLR. The witness’ tool. Proof of life? No, proof of material crime. Proof of murder.

I did not speak even a single word to anyone the entire time I was there — five hours in total. No one was conversing, really. Not even the groups of teenagers on school trips. I could hear guides speaking softly but that’s about it.

Auschwitz commands silence.

Later, after we have processed, Auschwitz commands rage.

How to make sense of something that is beyond comprehension? How to establish and maintain a sense of narrative for something so surreal?

I have set myself an impossible task. Filing a dispatch from Hell.

The sky was extraordinarily blue and gave my photos an almost Mediterranean quality. I converted every shot to black and white.

This is what I saw through my lens.

Cases of human hair. And a blanket woven from human “fibers”. A blanket. A fucking blanket. Laid across a divan so as to suggest how Frau So-und-So might have luxuriated beneath it.

Cases full of eyeglasses.

If someone made me surrender my glasses I wouldn’t be able to see anything. I have extremely poor vision and am treacherously close to “legally blind”.

I couldn’t get this thought out of my mind: What if someone took my glasses? What if I were made to live out my final days — or even minutes — without sight? Powerlessness in the extreme.

Hundreds and hundreds of pairs of wire frame glasses.

I took a photo. I converted it to black and white.

Cases of bowls. Spoons. Forks. Rolling pins. Cooking utensils.

Click. Photo.

Cases of combs.

Cases of prosthetic devices and wooden limbs. Someone’s artificial foot.

Click. Photo.

The windowless basement with the concrete starvation cells. Four to a cell, no food, no water and no room to sit, never mind lie down. I cannot even think of this. I cannot take a photo. There is no way to ever look at that again.

Cases of children’s clothing. One small shoe. I nearly vomited at the sight of that shoe. The tiny sweater missing a button and a hole in the sleeve. So tragically tiny, that shoe.

Display cases full of lists. The meticulously itemized catalogue of the murder of a people. A well-documented genocide, this one.

The gas chambers. What can anyone say about gas chambers? Nothing.

And then Birkenau, the larger facility, where everything moved along tickety-boo because the trains could pull up to the loading dock and the selections could be made right then and right there. Efficiency at its best.

A cattle car — just one — stood on the train tracks in the hot sun. I walked around it. Locked. Impenetrable. Suffocating. Air so hot it would burn your lungs.

I thought about my parents. How they would more than likely have been sent the wrong way. This way to the gas chambers, ladies and gentlemen. Schnell.

My brilliant and shy father. My beautiful and funny mother. What would any of it matter? They would not have been seen as human beings with human traits or qualities beyond their possible abilities to do hard labor.

And what about me? What about my sisters? Would we have made it past the first night at Auschwitz? Would we have been “selected”?

The image that tortured my mind was this: the last precious seconds of holding someone’s hand. And then the hand is gone. Ripped away. The desperation of being abandoned as your mother or your father or your sister or your brother or your lover or your spouse or, my god can I even write this, your child is torn from your grip. Torn from your life.

You are alive, perhaps, but in truth, from that moment on you are dead.

Meanwhile, in a room with photos of Dr. Mengele and some of the subjects of his experiments, a teenaged boy started to cry. All the typical adolescent bravado gone. He couldn’t be cool, dude. He was devastated.

The only sound I remember from the day is some occasional croaks from a bunch of bullfrogs. They were hovering near the surface of a pond at Birkenau. Just past the ruins of the crematoria.

Everything else is silence. In black and white.

If you ask me to describe my day at Auschwitz, this is all I can say. Snippets. Moments of clarity as I think about my camera settings and focus my lens.

What I want in those photos is the sound of the silent. I want the voices of the victims. I want their stories in my images. I want something of the millions who disappeared: ash through air.

I want my photos to register the grief, yes, and also the shock.

I had read the books. I had seen the films. I thought I knew what Auschwitz was about. Until I went. Until I stood in that hell, on that blood-soaked land of murdered souls and saw what evil looks like. Face to face.

What does it mean to bear witness?

I pondered that question before I posted some of my photos to Facebook. What response am I hoping for, I wondered. Is this the right thing to do? Is this the moral thing to do?

In the end, I decided that the only way to make sure those victims are never forgotten is to keep telling the stories. So I posted. And decided to write this piece. Not because I think it gives 6 million deaths any kind of meaning. There was and there is no meaning. There was and there is no higher calling. The six million were killed because they were Jews. Find the meaning in that.

No, no meaning. Just a dispatch. Just what I saw.

Last night, I dreamed again and again that I was trying to post links to various photos from the Internet. Every time I would post the link the photo would disappear. I could not communicate what I so desperately wanted to say. Even a lay psychiatrist could figure out the meaning of that one.

The suitcases, all marked up like the luggage of a tour group. The hair blanket. The tiny shoe. The glasses. And the idea that someone was forced to let go. Forced to drop the hand. Forced to part. Forced to go to the left while the other was marched to the right. Schnell. Und schneller.

This is my dispatch from Hell.

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