*It's taken awhile to get back completing my post travel blog. Life started again, but I'm slowly progressing in converting my travel journal over to blog form:
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During my second day in Berlin I couldn’t help but look forward to the long leisurely train ride to Poland. I looked forward a cool train car where I could reflect on my journey and specifically my pilgrimage to Auschwitz. The train ride to Poland ended up being the most unbearable hours of my trip. The air conditioning in the train was not working and I was traveling in the midst of a summer heat wave. Not to mention, the train was packed. An hour into the ride my clothing was drenched, sweat was pouring down my face, tiny openings at the top of the windows offered scant relief from the stifling, stale air. To make matters worse the train car was inundated with European teenagers traveling to the capital of cheap revelry – Krakow. On the way to Krakow I tried valiantly to reflect on why I was going; but it was hot. It was nearly impossible to breathe. The stench was overwhelming. Positively overwhelming.
And yet I knew the dark irony of the situation. In those moments my mind kept drifting to the haunting train car scene in Night, and those visions of the prisoners starving, ready to kill for just a piece of bread. Even in the midst of my unreflective, discontented state on the train, I knew some twisted, unrelenting force was driving me closer and closer to Auschwitz.
The bus ride to Auschwitz was only marginally better than the train ride. It was cooler, but full of hung-over college kids. It was a despicable scenario, these backpackers galavanting through Eastern Europe drinking cheap beer and merely hopping on a bus to Auschwitz to kill time between one night of debauchery to the next.
Fortunately, I had Matisyahu on my iPod. The Hasidic Jewish reggae artist sung to me about redemption and the Promised Land. I forgot about the people on the bus and began to remember late nights in my little bedroom in Western, New York, surrounded by books from the A. University library. I remembered lying on my floor, taking notes, crafting my first research paper. I remembered reading Night for English class, confronted with the realities of human depravity. It was then as a sophomore in high school that I knew I would have to make a journey to Auschwitz. I don’t know why. Every sophomore at A-A completes a Holocaust project - but why do I seem to be the only one affected enough to journey across Europe alone on a sketchy Polish train to see this place of such despicable horror?
I remember coming into Auschwitz that day. The woods cleared and first I saw the barbed wire. Behind it the buildings. They looked familiar, that familiarity of something you’ve only seen in pictures. I was hard to believe, even after the hours spent in college libraries, and the long nights of paper-writing.
I remember the hair. The pile of human hair covered an area as big as my classroom. I remember the basement of Auschwitz Block II where countless prisoners were tortured and killed for leading uprisings, for standing up in faith, for maintaining a belief that injustice can be overcome. I remember the train tracks and the gate at Aushchwitz II-Birkenau. It was bright, sunny day and quite crowded with tourists. Despite all that, all I could think about was Elie Wiesel stepping off that train. The smell of burning flesh, the babies cast into the fire. The first time I read it I had to close the book. I remember opening it, reading it again. Closing it. Giving up for the night. And I thought about the pseudo-historians who denied that it ever happened.
But what I remember most about that day at Auschwitz was the countryside. The Polish countryside bears the marks of poor rural living, something that was the norm for me until I moved away at 18. On the two hour drive from Krakow to Auschwitz I felt keenly like I was at home. There was nothing foreign about the simple homes and farms, the haggard people, the old cars. It was not quaint like the French countryside, nor picturesque like the Swiss countryside. It bore the marks of everything I’d grown up knowing.
And there in Poland, on the outskirts of Auschwitz, this sick, dark thought started to creep into my mind and heart. I realized that the Polish inhabitants had been living in these towns for years, much as my own ancestors had been farming in the same town since immigrating to America. I realized that throughout the years of Nazi oppression those same families were there, occupying those little homes and farms and watching idly from their fields as train upon train passed by. Full trains. Full trains that returned empty.
And I saw it happening in Western New York. The Polish were just ordinary people. People just like my own neighbors. We would not have behaved any differently. I like to think I would have, but how? How can ordinary farmers lead an uprising against the Nazis? And against what exactly? The whole complex was kept in an air of mystery. Inhabitants were moved out of the immediate surroundings. As we crept closer to Auschwitz the towns gave way to dark, haunting forests. I believe my own neighbors, my peers, and dare I say my teachers and church leaders would have sat idly by. Had this happened in Western New York, we would have merely prayed in the comfort of our pews and quietly debated in the safety of our classrooms. We would have caved to the demands of the oppressors, afraid to stand out, to make the first move. We would have justified our safe and practical decisions.
The world has far too few revolutionaries. I'm inclined to believe the revolutionaries are the eccentrics. They are the ones who chafe at mainstream society and its inane residents. They are the people who question the norm and offer radical solutions to problems we have accepted. These are the ones whom we will call on to fight injustice and oppression when it arrives upon our doorstep.
The pilgrimage to Auschwitz helped me to think about the whole scope of the war and its effect on ordinary lives. The Polish learned to endure situations that would have been seemingly unthinkable years before. And what if you had told a promising Jewish student or established shop-keeper that he would be torn from his family, that he would die in a pool of his own diarrhea with other prisoners’ excrement dripping from the bunks above? As I wandered through the barracks at Birkenau I tried to picture these men and women who were respected citizens perhaps only a year or two before their death, now treated worse than animals, even behaving as animals.
There is not much more I can say about Auschwitz. Was it cathartic? No. It was a bit like going to the cemetery seeking comfort and cleansing but finding that you're are no closer to that person you’ve lost. You leave feeling just as empty as when you came. I guess I thought that maybe going to Auschwitz would make it easier for me to understand. But what exactly am I trying to understand? Perhaps I want to understand why God ordained a world where sin reduces us to such horrific creatures. How ordinary husbands and fathers can kill for a living. I cannot understand a world in which the beauty of the image of God is marred by cruelty and irrational hatred. God's own people are chased down and tormented and forced to suffer the unthinkable under a human system of oppression. What is the purpose? Where is the redemption? I do not even know for sure why I went, I just know that I needed to go.
I finished this entry in my journal with the question: “Do I really want to understand?”
I believe now, upon more reflection, that I do want to understand. I believe that the quest for understanding drove me there in the first place. Perhaps that quest for knowledge and understanding is somehow deeply intertwined in the purpose God has ordained for my existence. Perhaps that is what drives me on a solitary pilgrimage when other twenty-somethings are caught up in entertainment. In the end it is not evil that I understand, nor do I truly grasp the reason or Providential purpose of it all. I do understand human apathy. The pilgrimage to Auschwitz taught me that I cannot judge the onlookers. I would have been there among them. Perhaps I am one of them even now.
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