Auschwitz-Birkenau: 75 years later

When I was first planning a trip to Poland, I thought I might pass on a visit to Auschwitz, the largest Nazi death camp and only one preserved in much of its original condition. I had been to the Dachau concentration camp on my first visit to Europe half a century ago, and in the intervening years, learned how the Holocaust had shaped postwar history. I had seen so many movies, read many books and articles. What more was there to learn or feel? But Renate wanted to go, and yes, of course, I realized, how could I not go to this place during a trip that took me so close to it.

So one afternoon during our stay in Krakow, we boarded a mini bus for the hour's ride to the Auchwitz-Birkenau Memorial. On arriving with our tour group, we were assigned a guide--in Spanish or English--and began our tour of Auschwitz I, the main camp. A sobering walk from the first moment. We filed through exhibit halls, through barracks, down a basement corridor and rooms where lethal injections took place, a room where prisoners awaited "trials", past gallows and a courtyard where people were shot. We filed past exhibits of piles of prosthetics, shoes, suitcases, and chillingly, human hair. In a women's dormitory, photos of the inmates with their direct gazes stared back at us, and I can still see their faces, mostly impassive, and all the more heartbreaking for that.

A three-kilometer bus ride to Birkenau showed us the ruins of the crematoria and a monument to the victims. We walked along the train tracks where selections were made--to one side, death, and to the other forced labor under cruel and  humiliating conditions. Most victims were Jews, but there were also Slavs (also considered an inferior race in Nazi ideology), Roma, gays, political prisoners and many others. Categories that would have included me had I lived in that time and place.

Although I was already aware of most of the facts our guide related, the emotional impact of walking in this place where such massive crimes occurred caught me by surprise. I could not take photos--how could any capture the reality of what this place once was. At Birkenau, I took just this one.

Auschwitz was clearly more visceral and overwhelming compared to the Dachau memorial in Germany. Sobered by that visit, I remember staring at "Never Again" engraved in stone. I think I believed it then--in the sense that surely the world had learned its lesson. That was in 1969, 20 years past the Nuremberg trials, well into an era of people's liberation movements rising in many colonized countries. Many of my generation shared a belief that we were well past the horrors of World War II, and that these progressive movements around the world would bring more and more freedom into being. 

Today an older me, with a half century more of history behind me, sees elements of fascism reemerging in places around the world. Just yesterday PBS carried a story of the suppression of the judiciary in Poland; of course, the US has Trump, Russia has Putin, and nationalist, anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic parties have gained power in many places. Not as toxic as the Nazi regime and without the military might behind it, but a potentiality; Never Again will always remain a hope and challenge rather than stated fact.

Renate and I spent the last day of our Krakow visit in Kazimierz, the historic center of Polish Jews, once its own city, now a part of Krakow. In a bookshop there I bought a copy of Man's Search for Meaning, by Victor E. Frankl. I remember reading this book in college, this story of Dr. Frankl's imprisonment in Nazi camps and his story of survival. "The classic tribute to hope" was the phrase on the cover of this book. I decided to read it again to counter the despair I felt after visiting Auschwitz. When we left Poland, I took it home and finished reading it just yesterday. I found more in it than I had remembered from my first reading all those years ago.

Frankl, an Austrian medical doctor and psychologist, argued that humans can endure any "how" as long as they have a "why". He saw that prisoners who could imagine a positive outcome--a reason to stay alive--often lived longer than others who had given up. A Wikipedia synopsis of the book put it this way: "Frankl concludes that the meaning of life is found in every moment of living; life never ceases to have meaning, even in suffering and death. In a group therapy session during a mass fast inflicted on the camp's inmates trying to protect an anonymous fellow inmate from fatal retribution by authorities, Frankl offered the thought that for everyone in a dire condition there is someone looking down, a friend, family member, or even God, who would expect not to be disappointed. Frankl concludes from his experience that a prisoner's psychological reactions are not solely the result of the conditions of his life, but also from the freedom of choice he always has even in severe suffering." He also notes a connection between hope and the immune system. Death rates spiked during the last week of the year, after those who vainly hoped for freedom by Christmas faced another year with no freedom in sight. 

Clearly positive thinking won't save us. On the contrary, only 1 in 20 concentration camp laborers--those who survived the initial "selections"-- would survive their ordeal, dying from typhus, starvation, cold and overwork, the random brutality of SS guards. Also, another much-less-quoted section from Frankl in Chapter 1 tells us this: "On the average, only those prisoners could keep alive who, after years of trekking from camp to camp, had lost all scruples....they were prepared to use every means, honest and otherwise, even brutal force, theft, and betrayal of their friends, in order to save themselves. We who have come back, by the aid of many lucky chances or miracles....we know: the best of us did not return." 

By 1997, when Frankl died, his book had sold more than 10 million copies and been translated into 24 languages. A gift from the past to those of us entering a future of continuing injustices around us.  

And a message to remind us that we have to create our own "why"in life, remembering we always have the power to choose our response to what befalls us.

Next: a tour of Kazmierz and the resilience of Jewish culture