Reflections from Auschwitz

Contributed by student minister Frances Grant. The anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz is on 27 January each year.

It’s Wednesday, 18 January 2012.

The smell outside is wonderful at 2 o’clock this afternoon. It is one of those very clear mid-winter smells. Quite subtle – but fresh, crisp – of winter trees mostly, with a hint of bark and bracken breathing out oxygen – and clean, so clean the air, and cold.

The ground is white - 6 inches of powder snow over a vast landscape of silver birches and fields and tall ash. A few vehicles have compacted the snow, in tracks, but there’s no melting yet, no slush. The sky, too, is white – at least it was throughout the morning, but now the sun seems to be gleaming through the clouds in that colourless way. Actually it is shining – weakly peachy, apricot, ethereal. It’s minus 2 degrees, and quite still. It has an almost mild feel.

This is all important. Seventy years ago the contours of the countryside were identical. Probably so were the deep white winters.

But the smells, they were different. Diarrhoea, sewage – note, sewage not sewerage – and carcasses, burning and smoking with their grey yellow pall, of thousands upon daily thousands of the dying living of Auschwitz. 

Over a million all told, says our guide, Kasha. At this precise moment we are going round the men’s huts – never heated, she explains, unless the Red Cross were visiting…    She speaks of numbers too big to comprehend, of incoming Jews and Poles and Romany folk “sent to the left”, or if they were lucky packed into real showers then sent to sleep on straw before hard hard labour of unmentionable kinds for months on end, and finally death from simply being spent...

She shows us the now bare blocks, whose rooms house great mountains of things behind huge sheets of glass: enamelled children’s chamberpots taken off their parents at their entry to the camp; pairs of shoes, two tons of human hair; there’s gold from teeth collected from the dead, dolls. She tells us of Capos and tortures, apathy and disease, layers of lies, and tunes in orchestras. Sorry - orchestras??  … Ah, orchestras, playing in the mornings so that prisoners going to their work could be counted more easily – the prisoners marched more methodically to music.

My Australian companion says, Fuck my life.

The short Japanese man beside us keeps taking his photos, and the big guy from Yorkshire is capturing everything on his i-Pad – lovely big luscious sexy screenshots in lovely big luscious sexy colour …

What seems to satisfy about Auschwitz is that I can capture it, put it in a pot, label it, and preserve it like jam. It’s mine, I experienced it, and now I can put it in the cupboard for future consumption.

I need to think like this, because I don’t want to consider this real evidence. I don’t want to know its not here to be captured. I don’t want to hear it tell me that it is alive, in Africa, in Asia, in Darfur and Rwanda, and Afghanistan and Syria, the Hamas, Libya … and in every human heart set on hatred and revenge and power and annihilation of “other”. I don’t want to answer its question … “When you leave here, will you learn from me?”

The Nazi in Frances has an age-old problem. Ignore reality, or know and act on the truth that this is not ok.

Because this really is not ok.

It is not ok.

You tell me it is … ultimately.  And I know.

But today it’s just … not … ok.