Death Camp Auschwitz

January 31st, 2007 will definitely be a day in my life I will always remember. Today was definitely the most somber day I've had since Sept. 11, 2001. I visited the Auschwitz Museum. At first the name "Auschwitz Museum" seems to be a terrible name to call the terror and death machine of the Nazi regime. "Museum" and "terror" (or ethnic cleansing-genocide) don't seem to match in my book. When I think of museum I think of the Louve, the Smithsonian or something light having to do with art and artifacts. I've never been to a museum where the objects you view have everything to do with suffering and death not to mention the evil capacity for humans against human.

As I walked on to the grounds of Auschwitz 1 this morning and caught my first glance of the famous and ironically eerie entrance which reads, "Arbeit macth frei" I braced myself for what I would hear and see in the following hours. "Arbeit Macth frei" means, "work will set you free". The Nazi's were master deceivers and all the way through the tour I was dumbfounded by how organized and systematic their lies were. They were masterminded liars--and their lies were believed. Work will set you free, yes, I guess that could be true in the lives of the concentration camp victims if freedom is freedom through death alone.

I was not at Disneyland, this was no carnival, this wasn't even a fun exhibition. It is a place of remembering and acknowledging what can go wrong in humanity. SO WRONG! Yet, still knowing this title of "museum" sounds too "fun". The tour got started after a short graphic video presentation. One of the first "exhibition halls" we entered had a room with a glass window. In front of us was a room full of human hair. It doesn't seem real. Was that really HUMAN hair? In front of my was hair of real people who had been brutally exploited and murdered. It wasn't just hair in front of me of any breathing organism but of human people; real people with names, families, dreams, hopes, faith, education, fear, joy, confusion, and courage.

We saw the barrack where 400-700 people lived( 5-7 people per bunk with three tiers) , where people went to the bathroom (only twice a day with constant fear of being beaten, where people were put to horrible medical testing (male and female sterilization experiments, children with a twin research, etc), cramped standing torture cells, suffocation rooms, starvation rooms, hall of death (with a wall where they shot people in the nude), and crematoriums. Yes, this was all very unlike any other "museum".

I found a personal challenge. I felt so twisted inside as we saw evidence of all of this. I wasn't responding to what I was seeing with they type of emotion that I expected. I expected this day to possibly bring me to tears. But there were no tears and honestly there wasn't even feelings of consuming anger or sadness. I had to ask myself, "have I gone cold"? "Do I just have a hard heart?" What I was seeing was so beyond my idea of what humanity is capable of. It can't be real... yet it is very much REAL. For me there was a head and heart disconnect. It seems impossible for hundreds of thousands of people to be gassed and murdered, that prisoners would be forced to enter into the gas chamber to extract gold and silver fillings from the murdered. It doesn't seem possible that the same living prisoners would be ordered to cut off the dead peoples hair for use by the Nazi's for something else. That hair was later used to make textiles. Those textiles made uniforms. Some of those uniforms were worn by concentration camp prisoners (if I understood correctly)

None of this seems humanly possible which leads me to believe that it was all so very inhuman. No wonder I didn't have a tear filled day. It was beyond that. It isn't that I've gone cold or have a hard heart. It is shock. What we saw and learned about in the very place where it occurred is heart numbing. It is so different than reading about it in a book. There may not have been tears today. I may not have felt much of anything. I have a suspicion that what I've experienced today, what I saw and visualized in the actual location, what we were taught, will go with me for many weeks to come...yes, I'm still picking my jaw up from the floor.

By the end of the day "museum", did seem like an appropriate way of describing the location of the horrible proofs and memory of such awful human happenings. A museum is by definition a place where we display objects of historical value. The operative word for me is "objects". The objects and places we saw represented human lives. Yet they also represented the objectification of human life needed for such evil to occur. Auschwitz for we was about "objects" or rather "objectification". The Nazi's or rather, Hitler, hoped to annihilate 11 million European Jews. He didn't reach his goal but he made great headway. The whole organization of the Holocaust and what we witnessed at Auschwitz could only happen because human life became for so many just an object. You can't treat people the way they did without taking the humanity out of them. The Auschwitz "Museum" is about looking at death objects and learning about how the Nazi's systematically murdered people who they could only have known as objects.

I walked away today really wondering about the other side of what we saw and learned about. We talked mostly of the prisoners. I wonder about the people who were in charge and calling the shots. I wonder about the Nazi soldiers who in my book also lost their humanity in the process. I don't understand how it is humanly possible to treat people as the Auschwitz prisoners were treated without yourself becoming subhuman. What makes Auschwitz and other places like this so sad is that everyone involved loses something.