Have you ever seen a flimsy moth being
drawn towards a flame. It gets too close, has its wings singed, falls off,
crawls away, in case it had not died already, grows the wings again and
approaches the same flickering flame again.
I am that moth when it comes to Auschwitz-
Birkenau.
Visited the haunting place for the first
time in 2012, was left devastated, vowed never to visit again and go through the inevitable
depression that suffocates you for weeks at a stretch.
I was there for the 6th time on
Sunday the 13th of May 2018.
I resisted penning down my thoughts so far
and I give in today.
I am a certified WW II addict. I lapped up
everything available about Nazi Germany, Hitler and the Holocaust in
particular.
The seminal work The Rise and Fall of theThird Reich by William L Shirer kickstarted the obsession.
The brilliant six part documentary that onlyBBC is capable of making deepened my fascination.
Countless films, the top amongst them, The
Pianist, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, Son of Saul, Schindler’s List and the
ultimate Life is Beautiful reduced me to copious amount of tears and a near
nervous wreck.
But, none of this prepares you for actually
visiting the place.
Opinion is divided on whether such trips,
nicknamed Holocaust tourism, are necessary.
In my opinion, yes.
All the more now, as
most of the people with firsthand experience are dead, and those who belong to
the next generation of the affected families are already getting old. Soon,
there will be a complete disconnect. A visit here would be a stark reminder of
what happened, not in the distant past, but in recent memory, in a world that
was apparently civilized, where a world order existed.
This is a reminder of
what could happen, once again, if we choose to let a few run riot.
When I see leaders like Donald Trump, Recep
Erdogan, Milos Zemen, Narendra Modi and Viktor Orban, coupled with even Nobel Peace Prize winner standing mute witness to the Rohingya crisis, the horrors of the
Auschwitz- Birkenau suddenly appear to be becoming a possibility, yet again.
After six visits, I am qualified to lead my
friends on a detailed tour by myself, but to a first timer, I would strongly
recommend a guided tour in a language that you are comfortable with.
The walk around tour starts in front of the
incongruous “Work sets you free” sign.
The Nazis were perfectionists. The
camouflage was so complete that no deported Jews, the political prisoners, the
Roma Gypsies, the homosexuals, the dwarves ever suspected that anything so
catastrophic was in the offing.
Everyone believed that they were being
relocated. The Nazis did not want chaos, panic and disorderly conduct. They
wanted everything to be smooth.
The offices of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp
have done a wonderful job in coaching the guides and the guides are
knowledgeable, and while they must be tired of repeating the same tour day in
and day out, they appear genuinely interested in letting you know the full
details.
In my last visit, our guide was one
Magdalena. She was beyond perfect. She had a melancholic face. It appeared as
if it was ready to break into crying at any moment. And she was elegant. She
was impeccably dressed. Her diction was perfect, so much so, I had to re-look at
her name tag to ascertain from her surname that she was indeed a Pole. Her
voice had a quivering tenor, it was as if she was struggling not to weep as she
spoke. She spoke in one constant monotone. A flat rendition. She never raised
her voice. At moments she paused, as if gathering herself, recovered her
composure which looked as if it was about to crumble, and continued with the
same élan.
She must audition to the next movie on the concentration camp for
the part of the voice over, and Oscars may introduce a new category and award
her the statute.
A female Morgan Freeman.
The way the visit is organized coupled with
her sombre tone made the last visit of mine the most impactful.
It starts, rather innocuously, in Block 4,
and continues to Block 5 and 7.
The first rooms display pictures of the
layout of the concentration camps, some photographs of people arriving at the
camp, a map of how Auschwitz sat right at the centre of the occupied Europe,
and how several spokes from each corner all converged on the central dot,
called Auschwitz.
A few quotes, slowly increasing in the
vitriol, building up the sense of despondency.
The visit slowly increases the torment
quotient, a isometric view of the gas chambers is shown. And blue prints of
precise engineering drawings are on display. Every single detail is about
efficiency. The flow of people in one direction, neatly arranged chambers for
disrobing, with pegs numbered, (the victims were told that they were going for
a shower, and were asked to remember the peg numbers, in order to collect their
clothing on emerging), and the simple and efficient openings on the roof from
which to dump the measured quantity of Zyklon-B, the electrical winch/lift to
transport the bodies one level above after they were gassed, the sequentially arranged ovens to
incinerate the bodies.
Every single detail screams efficiency.
You see some empty containers of Zyklon-B
recovered after the liberation. Ironically, the Zyklon-B, which was used to gas
the victims, was produced at IG Farben, the same unit where the concentration
camp inmates worked the whole day as cheap labour.
You are guided to the next room, where, all
along the left wall of a 15 meter long hall, in a glass enclosure that is at
least a meter deep, piled right up to the ceiling, you see human hair.
The guide mentions the term human hair just
as your eyes adjust to the poor light and you flinch away from the glass
partition as if someone had physically assaulted you. I saw this girl walking
in front of me, it was her first time certainly, and I saw her jump three feet
sideways with her hands help up and in defence. She was petrified.
The guide drones on saying how after the
gassing was completed (the chambers were locked for 2 hours to ensure complete
killing and then the exhaust was started) the bodies were dragged out, hair was
shaved, gold filling of teeth were extracted and how every single thing that
could be used was recovered before the bodies were sent to the ovens.
She reels off statistics. How the killing
capacity was double the oven capacity to cremate, how one day’s killing took
two days of ovens operating round the clock, how this led to the immediate
construction of Birkenau, a camp 10 times the size of Auschwitz, where the
killing was “improved”, the capacity was increased. Lessons learnt in Auschwitz
were applied in Birkenau to make Birkenau the most efficient termination camp.
(more of it later)
You come across a document fixing the price
of human hair at 50 pfennig per kilogram.
The human hair was used in textiles and
making wigs for parlours and anatomy lessons.
From here it is non-stop battering of your
senses till they are numb.
Displays the size of a football field, hurl
at you eye-wear frames, some with lenses intact, brushes, utensils, suitcases,
prosthetic limbs…..
The suitcases carry the name, the town from
which the person hailed from, and date of birth. In case you failed to notice,
the guide is programmed to direct your gaze to that particular suitcase, the
details of which tell you that the possessor of that suitcase was just six years
old upon arrival and immediate death by gassing.
As you stand there transfixed and numbed by
the sheer size, the guide reminds you that this was just a fraction of what was
recovered upon liberation, that which the Nazis did not have time to burn away.
The numbers of 1.5 million dead is
repeatedly hammered into you, lest you forget it.
In one of the first three blocks, you walk
along the corridor, where the photographs of the inmates adorn the wall on
either side. All in striped pajamas, all gaunt, with bulging eyes, shaven head.
Each one meticulously numbered, the date of birth, the date of entry into the
camp, and the date of death. The luckiest one survived just a day. Few lasted
two to three years.
As you walk past Block 10, the guide tells
you that this was the place where medical experiments took place. Not the gory
macabre Doctor Josef Mengele stuff, that was in Birkenau, this was a
comparatively milder sterilisation experiments done to ensure that races other
than the pure Aryan race were not procreated!
Then you approach block 11, known as the
death block. Here the Nazi court tried and sentenced scores of inmates to death
by execution, for something as frivolous as a stolen loaf of bread. Punishments
were meted out. Prisoners were sentenced to confinements and standing cells.
The ones sentenced to death were disrobed and were marched to the courtyard
between blocks 10 and 11, where they were stood in front of the firing wall and
summarily executed. You walk the same route that those hapless victims walked
as they were led to their death. The extent of secrecy practised could be
assessed when you look up to the boarded windows of Block 10 overlooking the courtyard.
The guide stops you in front of the canteen,
where a makeshift gallows was erected to hang 11 men on the suspicion that they
helped three inmates escape. The public hanging was meant to be a deterrent to
dissuade others from trying to escape.
The only two approved modes of death, as
sanctioned by the Nazis, were, starvation and execution.
The guide informs you that you are about to
end the first part of the tour and takes you out of the double layer of
electric fences to the outside.
There you stand with a gallows facing you,
the gas chamber to your right and a decent looking villa about 100 meters down
on your left.
The commander of the camp, Rudolph Hoss
(not to be confused with Hitler’s man Friday, Rudolf Hess) lived in that villa
with his wife and five children, a mere 100 meters from the gas chambers and
the ovens that were burning the corpses.
Your mind connects with this scene from the
film, and see how apt the scene looks now when you stand here in this spot.
The guide tells you of the poetic justice,
when the authorities hunted down Hoss after the liberation and brought him to
trial and agreed that he would be hanged at the spot between his villa and the
gas chambers, facing the camp for which the special gallows was erected.
You then walk to the gas chamber. This was
a rudimentary chamber compared to the Rolls Royce model the Nazis deigned and
improved subsequently at Birkenau. This one did not have proper chambers to
disrobe (as a result most often the inmates disrobed outside on the lawns), no pegs to hang
your clothes, no fake shower nozzles that were never connected to a water
supply.
This cavernous chamber is however big, the
floors almost slippery smooth with all those rubbing and hosing down that must
have happened after each gassing, scratch marks on the walls, the cyclops of an opening from where the masked Nazi soldier must have dropped the
measured quantity Zyklon-B. No one speaks
a word. The guide announces before we enter the chambers that she would
remain silent in respect of the dead. Jelly legged you enter the next chamber,
where the two ovens stand. The spine tingles and the hairs on your hand stand
on their root.
The calculated quantity part of the Zyklon
-B is what unnerves you. The Nazis had earlier stumbled upon this simple means
of killing by experimenting in the basements of Block 11 on a group of Soviet
POWs. They later kept fine tuning till they arrived at a precise number on how
many grams of Zyklon – B was needed per person.
It is not possible for a normal human being
not to cry at this instant. It feels natural to wipe the rolling tears away.
You step out and see towards the villa and
cannot bring yourself to believe that five children played children games and
read comics by the fireplace a stone’s throw away from ovens burning human
flesh.
The guide gives you a 20 minute break after
which a bus will transport you to the same horrors on an industrial scale.
To Birkenau!
By this time you are already numbed. The
iconic entrance gate with the railway line going right inside sends shivers
down your spine. You reach the unloading spot along the railway tracks, you recognise it from those photographs. On the other side of a rather wide road,
you see the sorting place.
Here, a German officer and a Doctor
decided, with a simple wave of their wrist with a pointed finger, whether the
new arrival would proceed to the right, inside the concentration camp, where
the person would be subjected to inhuman conditions of living, a meagre ration
of food and inevitably would starve to death, or walk further down the road to
the end where they would go to one of the five crematoriums and immediately
gassed to death.
The old, the invalids, the women and children usually walked
this way and were killed almost immediately. Here the charade was complete. A
walk down a corridor, a place to remove the dresses and hang on numbered pegs,
a chamber with fake shower heads, the complete works.
German efficiency at its best!
Four hours since you started and the
gravity of the whole tour that you had just completed starts to sink in.
You step out of the Birkenau camp, a
privilege most of the inmates did not possess, get into your car and drive
away.
Just 76 years ago, millions had arrived on
these very platforms, clutching their suitcases, utensils, shoe polish cans,
brushes, toys and dresses hoping to start life in a new place, wondering what
language they needed to learn, what new trade they had to perfect, what new neighbours that they would have and died within the first few hours.
Those who died on the arrival were the
lucky ones.
Those who died after months of humiliation
and inhuman living conditions were far worse.
But, those who survived, having lost the rest
of the family, must have been the hardest hit.
On one of my earlier trips, I had seen a
Polish gentleman who had been liberated from the camp at the end of the war. He
completed the entire tour without uttering a word, silently crying.
After my sixth visit now I would go into a
depressive state for a few weeks. The ever resilient human spirit will find its
strength and I will get back to normalcy.
I will have one more visitor who, on
spending a weekend with me at the end of a European tour, will ask me
“Is there someplace nearby, where we can
just make a day trip?”
And I will reply
“Do you know Auschwitz?”
