Pre-Site Visit Reflections
Auschwitz was founded on the orders of SS Reich Leader Heinrich Himmler on the 27th of April 1940 in Oświęcim, Poland. The first prisoners sent here were majority Polish Political prisoners who were to be exploited for slave labour. In March 1941, Himmler ordered a second and larger complex be built next to the original camp. Calling it Auschwitz II – Birkenau. It was divided into subsections, surrounded by electric barbed wire fences and imprisoned over 100,000 people at its summit. In the summer of 1941, Himmler gave orders to Auschwitz commander Rudolf Höß to build a centre at Auschwitz for the mass murder of Jews. A short time later in September 1941, the first tests of Zyklon B – normally used for pest control – were first verified here to be used for the mass killings of prisoners.
Four gas chambers were built at Birkenau which were capable of murdering up to 6,000 people each day. They were disguised as showers and under the guise of disinfection stations, prisoners were sent to their deaths if they were not of physical or mental capacity to be exploited for rigorous slave labour.
Auschwitz was where the infamous Josef Mengele carried out medical experiments on prisoners. Including the sterilization of Jewish women, and experiments on children, specifically twins.
Other groups of people were also targeted and transported to Auschwitz. On the order of Himmler, on the 29th of January 1943, approx. 20,000 Roma were deported to Auschwitz, the majority of whom died in the gas chambers.
Historians estimate that around 1.1 million people were murdered within Auschwitz-Birkenau, The majority being:
Approx. 1 million Jews
70-75 thousand Poles
Approx. 20 thousand Roma
Approx. 15 thousand Soviet POWs
Approx. 10-15 thousand prisoners of other ethnic backgrounds including Czechs, Belorussians, Yugoslavians, French, Germans and Austrians.
Upon the advancement of the Red Army, Himmler ordered the gas chambers and crematoria be destroyed in order to hide the traces of Nazi crimes, however, he was unsuccessful in this cover up. On the 27th of January 1945 when the Red army entered the camp, they found 7650 exhausted and starving prisoners, evidence of Nazi crimes in the form of buildings, photographs and other material artifacts such as almost eight tonnes of human hair and over a million men’s suits and women’s dresses.
Today, approximately 2 million people visit Auschwitz each year.
Having been assigned multiple pre travel readings focused specifically on Auschwitz-Birkenau, a few lenses which we explored pertained to the socio-political impacts that tourism has had on the preservation of the site, the differing ethnic and religious conflicts over the sites memorialization, public perceptions on photography at the site and debates over ‘dark tourism.’ Having become synonymous with the totality of the Nazi perpetrated holocaust against European Jews, the site itself has become popularized through film and memoir as the main site of atrocity.
Due to our thorough pre-visit examination of the socio-political climate of the site, our group is prepared to gather continued knowledge of the historical atrocities perpetrated here, and to approach the memorialization process with a nuanced and inquisitive outlook. As we visit both Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II, we will be asking various questions: How is the memorialization of this space upheld? Who is being commemorated, what methods are being used to remember them, and what are the curator’s intended messages? How do visitors around us engage with the site? What techniques are used in presenting images, artifacts, and structures? And above all, we will each be exploring our physical and emotional responses to this site of past atrocity.
Post-Site Visit Reflection
Preconceptions
Before embarking on the travel portion of our field school, our group took part in a week-long intensive set of class sessions in which we discussed assigned readings and met with many guest lecturers. Among our readings were many which discussed memory work surrounding the Auschwitz-Birkenau museum and former concentration camp. Many of these readings revealed a narrative that we were all unconsciously aware of yet had not fully recognized; since the Second World War, Auschwitz-Birkenau has come to be ‘the’ site of mass atrocity. Through pop culture representations, Auschwitz has become synonymous with the entirety of the Shoah, and in turn, has, as Tim Cole highlights, become synonymous with the Shoah, with Jewish culture, Judaism, and the elephant of Jewish history. In recognizing these conceptions before visiting the site, I believe many of us were overwhelmed by the enormity that this site entailed, both emotionally, intellectually, academically, and critically. Through various conversations that I had with fellow schoolmates, I felt safer in recognizing how everyone felt exactly as I did, that one could never read enough memoirs, tackle enough academic discourse, watch enough movies, meditate, cry, sleep, brace ourselves enough ever to be fully prepared, to the standards at which we were holding ourselves, to enter this place of such enormity with the dignity and respect its victims deserve.
Visitor Interaction. Vs Our Reaction
A significant point of contention for our group before visiting the site dealt with tourist interaction with the museum and concentration camp, reconciling with the reality of Auschwitz-Birkenau being a main attraction for Europe’s dark tourism industry, and in turn, trying to decide how we individually and as a group thought that this space should be approached in order to partake in this aspect of Shoah memory work in a ‘good’ way. This then begs the question we often grappled with: what makes one form of interaction ‘okay’ and others’ less’ okay? The truth we discovered is that there are no clear rights and wrongs; we could only try and uphold ourselves to the best of our abilities, recognize the ways others interacted with the site may upset us, reserve judgment, seek understanding, and carry on with interacting with the memory work. In retrospect, however, we realized that by looking deeper into how and why certain groups of people interact with sites like Auschwitz-Birkenau, Sachsenhausen, Mauthausen, and Ravensbrück, we can further understand how memory work is related through different cultures, age groups, and education systems. I would venture to say that I believe the whole group was unoffended by the other visitors interacting with this site, which we were not expecting due to our pre-travel discussions surrounding visitor etiquette being, at times, relatively poor. From my observations of our group’s interactions with Auschwitz-Birkenau, I could not provide one explanation, as everyone reacted differently. Some were more profoundly affected by one section, others in another, some with direct familial links to Shoah victims, and others with no Jewish background; I can only truthfully speak to one topic that came up in our debrief session following our visit: the sky. Many members of our group, including myself, had private moments while at Auschwitz-Birkenau, only to be spoken about after leaving, where we each looked up into the sky and noticed the birds, the clouds, the trees dancing in the breeze, the warmth of the sun on our cheeks. We felt a profound cognitive dissonance between what we saw and where we stood. In these momentary reflections, we reconciled with the reality that this space of atrocity where millions lost their lives in violence and suffering did not exist under a cloud of constant darkness, slick with snow, cold concrete and barbed wire, but in the world that we know too, where there are sunny warm days where the birds sing, and the trees grow tall and green. The most complex truth was that the Shoah, Auschwitz-Birkenau, and the suffering of those who were imprisoned, tortured, and murdered during the Shoah is not unimaginable because it happened in the same world we live in and under the same sky we see from our own homes every night back home.
The site itself / Construction Work
While walking through both Auschwitz-Birkenau, there was construction and preservation taking place, which created a surreal aspect to our group’s perspective. Due to our program’s focus on the memorialization of the Shoah, to saw and heard the construction materials, tents, and power tools in Auschwitz, a place where we have been told has been frozen in time, we were confronted with the reality of preservation. While trying to interact with the heavy context of the space, we hear power tools in the background, and we see men wearing safety vests working, maybe to them, just another contract. I wondered what these men were told before coming in and working on these buildings. Are they specially chosen, or are they employed by a construction site that exclusively works at sites of memory? Or were they just available to take the job? What does the museum pay them? Is it significantly more or average? Throughout the trip, our group had been wondering what the point was in maintaining these sites? What is the purpose of reconstructing buildings like former gas chambers and prison cells, which were once destroyed but are now used for tours? Is this ethical and right? On the other hand, would it be ‘less’ ethical or right to let these spaces fall away into nature? Our group had mixed answers and reasonings for why one person felt they should or should not be preserved, and this was the point: to find our feelings and be okay with them not necessarily fitting in with anyone elses. These are the questions that anyone looking to partake in the memory work of the Shoah will come up against, and because we all come from different backgrounds, educations, and histories, they are also the ones we must face alone.
Museum vs Birkenau
Having visited Sachsenhausen and Ravensbrück prior to Auschwitz-Birkenau, our group had already faced the curation and preservation of two wildly different spaces. Due to this, we knew that the Museum of Auschwitz and the Birkenau site would also be presented in a very different way. Moreover, within our pre-travel readings and discussions, we rigorously tackled the various forms of curation between the two sites of Auschwitz and Birkenau, the former being used as a museum and the latter as a preserved concentration camp. While it was hard for me, and I believe for many in our group, to argue with the way Birkenau is being presented (outside of the questions already posed relating to preservation), many of us questioned the ethics of some displays showcased within the Auschwitz museum. While I believe that my trying to relay these qualms here would not bring light to each topic sufficiently, I found that the main takeaway was that many within our group questioned the museum’s goal of perpetuating emotional manipulation through structuring exhibits in specific ways, which were bound to cause one to cry. One pertinent example could be displaying the children’s shoes separately from the adult shoes. The museum is structured so that one must walk through a room consisting of wall-to-wall piles of adult shoes, then leads you into a separate room with a display case holding only young children’s and babies’ shoes. I wonder here, was this intended to capitalize on the horror of the loss of life in this space, as if it wasn’t horrible already? Now you see that children were murdered as well, and here are their tiny shoes tipped over and faded in colour, bound to bring you to tears. Or was this only for practicality, that the children’s shoes are too small and may be lost among those of fully grown men and women? I suppose the main question here is, why should a need exist to derive an emotional response out of people when the content needs no exaggeration and no theatrics to be the horror it was?
Yad Vashem
One exhibit, however, spoke to the soul of our group, and that was the permanent Yad Vashem SHOAH exhibit in Block 27. Having just been confronted with piles of shoes and the display of human hair, we walked up to this exhibit, deflated and speechless. Upon the entrance hung a mezuzah, which a classmate pointed out was the only one she had seen at any of the former camps we had visited. She later remarked on how she found it beautiful that in this space of such horror, a mezuzah hung to signify a safe space free of evil. Immediately, we felt that this would be a very impactful space. Once inside, we were in a dark room where we heard music and laughter, singing, and celebration, and all around us were home videos showing the lives of Jewish people before the war. We saw wedding videos, babies taking their first steps, couples kissing, grandparents holding their grandchildren, people walking on the beach and laughing, Rabbis reading from the Torah, and people taking part in prayer. We saw Jews who were alive and in love and dancing in light. There was no sadness here, yet we all fell to tears because we knew the truth, and where we stood was where this was stolen. Yet, as a group so whole of questions, anger, sadness, and determination, we stood there in that dark room and, as the mezuzah indicated, felt that this was a space free of the evil of the Shoah; this was Jewish life, not death. Our group often discussed that the Shoah had become the entire understanding of Jewish history in pop culture when, in reality, the Shoah is only an aspect of the multifaceted, lively culture and history of Judaism and Jewish heritage. However, while we often discussed it, we didn’t frequently see this, yet we felt this here, and on this, I can only speak for myself; it reminded me of this battle we had been having with determining that the Shoah is ‘unimaginable’ in its horror. This exhibit revealed to me why the Holocaust is not unimaginable. Seeing these people hold their babies, get married, laugh, cry and pray, I saw myself, my mother, father, grandparents and friends. I saw a life I knew, and I recognized that in them. While we are often told that while visiting these places, you are not meant to think of yourself, I disagree; I believe that at that moment, seeing my mother in someone else, I felt the one heart of the world, and my heart broke. I think this is the opposite of hate, and in attempting to come as close as we can to recognize and contextualize that suffering is how the world can abandon hate and know peace.
Conclusion
I believe that each of us will be reconciling with what we faced at Auschwitz-Birkenau for the rest of our lives. There is no proper way to conclude a thought when broaching this subject, as every answer breeds five more questions. I know that each of us felt heavy leaving this site, and I only wish that moving forward with contextualizing and debriefing and recollecting on this experience, we all be kind to ourselves even when we don’t know the answer, can’t bear to think of it for another second, or remember something particularly upsetting. We are incredibly grateful to have been given the opportunity to partake in this field school and enter this site, along with every other one, with like-minded individuals who were equally invested and emotionally aware of the severity of our task. We will carry the memory of this trip, what we learned about memorialization, and the memory of those persecuted Jews, Roma, Sinti, POWs, homosexuals, people with disabilities, and several other minority groups into our philosophies, academics, and future pursuits. Thank you.
Citation:
Blum, Michael. 2020. “Last Auschwitz survivors speak: ‘We haven’t won, but we’ve taught our grandkids.’” The Times of Israel. https://www.timesofisrael.com/last-auschwitz-survivors-speak-we-havent-won-but-weve-taught-our-grandkids/.