"Breathe it in ..."

 

This entry refers to my experience of visiting Auschwitz II, also known as Auschwitz-Birkenau.    To build this camp, the Nazis destroyed 7 local villages and built the brick barracks from the houses of those villages.  Following this visit, I then went to Auschwitz l, originally a Polish Army barracks, which today is a museum .   I’ll write about that experience, as well as my experience of visiting 2 barracks in this camp in other entries.

A friend, before I visited Auschwitz, told me to ‘breathe in every bit of my experience.’  I remembered his words as I walked around the camps and did just that …

On the days immediately prior to my visit, and the actual morning of the day, thinking about ‘going to Auschwitz’ felt very surreal.  A bit like a child waiting for Christmas, the day I’d wanted to happen for such a long time, was suddenly upon me.  But it wasn’t excitement that I was filled with.  How could I be excited about visiting a place where around 1.4 million people had lost their lives at the hands of fellow humans?  I struggled, in the lead up to my trip when telling people I was going, with how to describe how I felt about it.  Saying ‘I was looking forward to it’ felt wrong.  And yet, I was looking forward to it, in a way.  I guess I was filled with a sense of anticipation about whatever I was going to experience.

On the actual drive towards the camp, I began to feel really anxious.  I realised I had no real idea as to how I would feel or how I would react when I got there.  There was also something about being in a people-carrier with 5 strangers, 4 of whom would share the experience with me and my mum when we got there. Our driver was very chatty and informative about the area, which was good because listening to him, stopped me dwelling too much on the experience ahead.  He was even able to make us laugh about the irony of us visiting Auschwitz in a German manufactured Mercedes.

Seeing the road signs to ‘Oświęcim,’ the Polish version of the German-named ‘Auschwitz’ kept bringing my anxiety to the surface.  I began thinking about how the Jews must have felt on their journeys to the camp; both those who knew where they were going and what fate awaited them, and those who didn’t.  What a very different experience to my own …

As a counsellor, I always try to step into my client’s shoes and experience their world through their eyes.  And I think that’s what I was trying to do here.  As I said in my previous entry, for me to be able to fully understand something, I need to experience it for myself.  That’s what I try to do (as much as I ever can step into someone else’s experience) in the counselling room, and was also I think, how I approached my visit to Auschwitz.

Getting out of the car and walking towards the main building felt surreal.  I think I dissociated slightly, especially when seeing the train track leading through the tower, knowing what had lain at the end of the thousands of peoples’ journeys.  I felt a heaviness inside of me; sadness, helplessness, disbelief, respect and awe.

Stepping inside, two things hit me; the vastness of the site and the air of stillness.

I felt that the air held a certain heaviness, almost a sense of its holding onto the gravity of what had taken place there. There was an eerie quietness to it too; despite many visitors being there.  I guess that some of this quietness could have been due to the amount of empty space, but it somehow didn’t feel that way, because alongside it, I also experienced a powerful sense of respect and sadness.

The vastness of the site, stretching both to the right and left of the central walkway for me, began to put into perspective the huge scale of the atrocity.

 Seeing both the surviving barracks and the remains of destroyed ones helped me appreciate just how many prisoners had been held there, especially knowing how crammed they were inside their huts.

Going round the site with a guide was a mixed experience for me.  In hindsight, I think it was probably the best way for a first visit, but I’d like to go back again, on my own.  The guide was very informative and ensured that we saw the key things, but going round with her, and also as part of a group meant that there wasn’t always enough time to experience fully and process what I was seeing and experiencing.  In hindsight, I think this might have been a good thing, as I think it had to potential to be overwhelming.  I feel that from the guided visit, I’ve been able to process more of the facts and to get a sense of the camp and life there, but I’d like to go back and process more of the emotions.  To spend a little more time at the sites that held more meaning for me, to stay still and reflect on the lives of the prisoners.

Seeing the electrified barbed wire fencing around the camps was powerful.  Thinking about its use in controlling prisoners through fear, and also providing a painful means of suicide for those prisoners unable to cope. 

I think the sense of awe I mentioned earlier relates to my amazement at the resilience of human beings.  I often feel it towards my clients in the therapy room when I hear the life experiences they’ve had or are living with.  That same sense of awe was magnified countless times inside this camp.  I still can’t begin to comprehend the scale of the fear, terror, humiliation, loss, hunger, anger, etc., etc., that the prisoners must have lived with constantly.  Their sheer helplessness, powerlessness, despair …

And what makes it even more incomprehensible, is that it was at the hands of other human beings.

Looking at the watchtower in this photo helps me envisage the Officers in it, keeping watch over the camp and the prisoners.  And I just can’t even begin to put myself into their shoes.  I can get a small sense of what the prisoners must have felt, but I just can’t comprehend the other side.  Or maybe, I just don’t want to.

Another really powerful moment for me, was my first sighting of a railway carriage used to transport people to the camps.  Having previously read about the horrific conditions within these carriages, actually seeing one up close, made me appreciate more just how horrific those journeys must have been.

Another poignant point for me was the end of the railway track.  Originally, the tracks stopped outside of the camp. But once it became an extermination camp, and to speed up the process of liquidation, prisoners were made to extend the tracks right into the camp.  New arrivals were then simply taken straight to the gas chamber … very close to the end of the railway track.

The gas chamber at this camp was destroyed by the Nazis before liberation to hide the evidence of their actions.  Its ruins still remain …

And again, for me, actually seeing this helped me see in my mind’s eye the experiences of those whose lives ended here.

For some reason, and I still don’t know why, I was drawn to the trees stood to the left of the gas chamber’s remains (photograph at the top of this entry).  Whilst I was there, I was certain there were 4 trees stood there, and even the first few times I looked at my photos, I only say 4 trees.  I was really surprised, almost a week later, to realise that there were actually 5 trees.

Walking around the camp, I kept thinking about my friend’s words.  I kept closing my eyes, taking a slow, deep breath and simply breathing in both my own experience and those of the people who suffered and lost their lives here.  I think it would have been easy to just walk around, seeing the sights.  And maybe that’s what some people need to do; just to see it.  Any more than that could be overwhelming.

I wanted a little bit more than that though.  I wanted to experience it in order to help me to comprehend it and to breathe it in as part of my own connection to humanity … both the horrors experienced by the prisoners and the incomprehensibility of man’s ability to afflict such horrors on other men, women and children.

Visiting Auschwitz ...

I visited Auschwitz last weekend.  It’s somewhere I’ve wanted to visit for a long time, and now that I’ve been, I know it was the right thing for me to do.  And I’d actually like to go back …

I’m going to try and put my motivations for wanting to visit into words, because it’s provoked a number of discussions when I’ve told people I’ve been.  At times, I’ve felt that I’ve had to justify myself and my reasons for going there.  Other people have been hugely interested and have wanted to know all about my experience.  I think it's good that it provokes such debate, as it helps highlight what an emotive experience it was, and still is.

From conversations I’ve had with people over the years, Auschwitz seems to be a place that people either want to visit.  Or they don’t. 

Why did I choose to visit?

For me, it’s a way of remembering the horrors that occurred there and showing my respect to the people who suffered and lost their lives there, and in other similar camps.  I have no family history linked to Auschwitz, no religious connections, but it still feels part of my personal history.  My sense of connection comes simply from being human. 

As a counsellor, I have a keen interest in trying to understand humanity and individual life experiences.  The holocaust and what took place in camps such as Auschwitz and on the journeys there, are almost incomprehensible to me.  Trying to imagine the terror and fear that Jews and other prisoners must have experienced is almost impossible and my heart goes out to every single one of them.  In preparation for my visit, I read a number of survivors’ stories just to try to understand their experience.  Their horror began way before arriving in the camps.  Life in their own homes became an experience of terror just waiting for what might happen to them.  Thinking about it, makes me appreciate just how very lucky I am.  I think it’s easy, living in twenty first century Britain, to take for granted the safety and security of your own home and freedom.  And yet I’m also aware that many people today (in the UK and around the world), for all kinds of reasons, don’t have that luxury that I’m fully appreciating right now.

What I find even more incomprehensible is the thinking and action of the Nazis and people involved in the torture of the prisoners.  As someone who is generally very accepting of people, I can’t comprehend the Nazi thought processes of hatred towards the Jews and other marginal groups.   It seems a very arrogant position to have taken; that they were the better people & to try to create a ‘pure’ Aryan race.  One of the sad things for me though, is that it’s still going on today; maybe on a smaller scale, but we still see racism, homophobia, sexism and all of the other human hatreds happening in the world today.  To some extent, it seems that we haven’t learned anything from the horrors of the past …

I wonder how many of the Nazi officers truly believed in what they were doing and how many of them were coerced into behaving the way that they did.  This is another aspect of the Holocaust that interests me.  As humans, research shows that we do have a tendency to follow those in authority and to behave in the same way as those around us.  I wonder how many of the Nazi officers found themselves in this position.  Maybe not agreeing with what they were doing, but feeling pressured into ‘having’ to do it so as to please their superiors and fit in with their comrades?  I guess that for their own survival, they felt they had no choice. To some extent, my heart goes out to those people too.  I wonder how their experience changed them?  And how did they rationalise what they had been involved in when it was all over? How, for the rest of their lives, did they live with their memories of the things they’d witnessed and carried out?

My guide at Auschwitz was telling us that there are probably many Officers’ diaries still buried at Auschwitz.  In the future, I think these will have informative experiences to tell.  Out of respect for those still living who experienced the Holocaust and for their children and grandchildren, the diaries are not yet being uncovered.

So to get back to my original question; my motivation for visiting Auschwitz was to try to comprehend the atrocities that happened there and across Europe during the Second World War.  For me, being in a place like Auschwitz helps me feel closer to the experience.   To fully understand things, I have a deep need to experience them for myself; I feel I can’t fully comprehend anything until I have.  Now I know that I can never personally experience what happened in, and around Auschwitz (and nor would I want to), but for me, by being there, I felt a closer connection to it and to everyone whose lives had led them there.  Touching the walls of the barracks and the bunk beds, touched by the hands of thousands of victims helped me feel closer to them …

Some people I’ve spoken to have viewed visiting Auschwitz as being voyeuristic.  Others have talked about the disrespect of turning it into a tourist attraction.  I think that for some people it maybe is these things.  The guide told us that some of the barracks have had to be closed to the general public due to graffiti. For me, the people who choose to disfigure any monument are showing disrespect and I disagree with their actions.  However, I also see that for some people, the graffiti may be their way of expressing their feelings towards what happened.  I also suspect that some of the graffiti was carved / written by people not fully understanding the depth of feeling that others would experience and maybe their naïve way of adding their own mark to history.  I don’t condone any such actions and whilst I was in Auschwitz I didn’t even want to take any photos of myself or the person I visited with.  For me, that somehow would have felt disrespectful, and moving towards treating the place as a tourist attraction rather than the monument I think I see it as.

And the issue of taking photographs have also provoked a number of comments.  I took a lot of photos whilst I was there.  I took photos of everything that had meaning to me.  And again, I can see how this could be viewed as voyeuristic.  But I’m glad I took my photos.  I couldn’t take everything in whilst I was there.  Looking at my photos, as I have done many times since I got back, is helping me process both my experience of visiting and my ongoing struggle with comprehending.  I’m a very visual person.  I’ve always loved photos.  And when I look back at photos I don’t just see the images; I feel the atmosphere and the feelings being experienced when the photo was taken.  And what I’ve found especially strange with some of my photos is the eeriness and bleakness that are visible in them.  Despite it being the 26^th October when I visited, it was an unusually hot and sunny day (22c) with blue skies.  

This photo to the right has had not filters or effects added; it’s just as I took it …

When I look at my photos, I 'see' and 'hear' the prisoners in a way in which I didn't in pictures before I visited.

The guide told us that the majority of Auschwitz survivors, when asked, will say that when they were liberated, they wanted the camps to be destroyed.  However, they’re all now glad that they weren’t and that they still exist as a reminder of what happened there. 

In my next entry, I’m going to try and put into words my experience of being there …