Travels to Poland I (Part 3 - the serious stuff)

On Thursday 7th my hosts "played truant" from the their own symposium and organized a trip to Auschwitz for me and two other non-Polish speakers - German and Japanese professors. This was some experience. You almost expect to turn up and find the place under a black cloud, with no flowers growing, and no birds singing, but from the outside the place looked just like an ordinary barracks, which, indeed, it once had been. The only indications of its history were remnants of once electrified barbed wire (with signs saying 'stop' in German and Polish in front of it) and the sign 'Arbeit macht Frei' over the main gate, which was beyond the main car park (which contained booths selling photo films, ice creams, etc. - the usual tourist stuff). Inside, what a difference. Many of the 28 barrack buildings contained exhibitions devoted to different aspects of camp life, or to the nations whose subjects had been incarcerated. The walls on both sides of the corridors of almost all these buildings were lined with photographs, three deep, 50 or more to a row, taken by the Nazis, of the camp prisoners accommodated in the first few years. It was chilling to wonder how many, if any, of these had survived. In later years there had been too many prisoners to photograph and they were identified solely by means of tattoos. In the final months many were transferred directly from the trains to the gas chambers.
When the Russians liberated the camp they found sacks of human hair in a warehouse ready for shipping to the German textile industry. This hair (much of which has been shown to contain traces of cyanide) had been unpacked, and was exhibited in one of the buildings. It filled a case approximately 50 m long by 2 m wide by 1.5 m deep. And this was only the stuff that hadn't been sent away from the camp.
It is difficult to describe the atmosphere around these and other horrors. Here and there were notices saying that " ... at least twenty thousand prisoners died in this room ... " or " ... an unknown number of prisoners died in this area ... " and requesting visitors show respect by maintaining silence. Needless to say, these notices were ignored by many. The Japanese guy in our party, clearly a keen photographer, had to take a snap of every gory detail - gas chamber, crematorium, gallows, etc., etc - perhaps he was studying technique. He must have taken well over 100 photos, and often the 'silence' of the most sombre areas was broken by the whine of his camera rewinding. Some tourists were wondering around with camcorders going full time, others couldn't be bothered to turn off their mobile 'phones, and in one courtyard in which an unknown number of Polish prisoners had been shot or hung I even saw one pair sitting on an outside window sill eating their lunch.
The visit ended with a 30-minute film. For me this did not have the same impact as walking through the buildings - it was the sort of thing seen many times on newsreels and TV programmes about the war. Clearly, though, it had a very traumatic effect on the two Poles in our party - and they had seen it many times. On my two visits to Poland it has seemed to me there is barely anyone alive in Poland whose family has not been affected by some Nazi atrocity or other. For example, one member of the family of the symposium organizer had been sent to a concentration camp and not seen again; she had, incidentally, also lost a relative on the American liner sunk by a U-boat early in the war. Another member of the staff of the department had lost all members of her family but one.