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Auschwitz: Connecting With Heritage
My Aunt Jane rang me one day and asked if I'd like to accompany her on a one-day tour of Auschwitz, organized by one of London's Jewish groups. I immediately said yes to the opportunity, as I had no idea when I would ever go myself, and welcomed the chance to go there with family.
Several of my extended family are camp survivors. My mother's first cousin, Lotte, was brought to Auschwitz in 1943, processed, tattooed and disinfected, then sent to a labor camp in western Poland, near the Czech border, where she spent the next 26 months. She survived, and is still a hale and hearty woman living in San Francisco near her daughter and two grandchildren.
A few days before the trip, Aunt Jane rang to tell me she was ill and to urge me to go alone. Our group of 230 (older couples, a few parents with teenage children and many young businessmen, most of them without their wives) filled an entire charter plane. After a two-hour flight we arrived in Cracow, Poland, then boarded five large buses to the camps. As we pulled up to Auschwitz, I felt an anticipatory dread mixed with excitement. Would this be orchestrated pathos or would a genuine experience be possible while being herded around with this large group?
Auschwitz was actually two camps: Auschwitz 1, where the famous Arbeit Macht Frei sign hangs, was basically a processing center; Birkenau (a.k.a. Auschwitz 2) is where Jews were sent either for labor or cremation.
Auschwitz 1
Auschwitz 1 is now a museum of organized exhibits, with clearly marked signs, display rooms of barracks and latrines, a re-created crematorium, gas chamber and rooms of 'artifacts'. By artifacts I mean a room with a mountain of eyeglasses, a room with what looked like acres of shoes, display cases of children's clothing, a pit filled with pots and pans, another with hairbrushes, and so on. But the display that got to all of us was the hair. A room lined with cases full of hair, hair in clumps, long hair, some still in braids or long plaits that wound down someone's back. In that same room was a display of cloth that had been made from the hair and used as a felt lining for clothing. In a photograph of the hair storage room discovered when the camp was liberated, we saw large bundles, wrapped in paper and neatly labeled, that amounted to seven tons of hair.
As I looked at these piles of belongings, lists of names, photographs of people, I felt myself getting numb. In that moment, I felt I understood a little of everything: that the capacity for numbness, for being unable to comprehend what is before you, is exactly what permits people to survive. It is a deeply human, self-protective mechanism. It is also, unfortunately, the very same capacity that allows people to do what the Nazis and others have done, namely, to distance themselves from horror, to see objects as just objects and separate them from their meaning, and then to make their owners into objects as well, so that everything loses meaning.
Then I walked into a room filled with suitcases stamped with names, origins, birth dates. As I walked down the aisle, there before me was a suitcase that read: "M. Frank, Holland, 1915."
Was it my family? I didn't know, but it was no longer a remote object, but very deeply personal.
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