Day 3, Krakow & Auschwitz-Birkenau Death Camps: posted by Barbara Horowitz, Mark Bello, Linda & Steve Jacobson, and Jules Olsman

Posted by Barbara Horowitz
We began this day as we have the others; learning about life prior to the holocaust, basically regular life with its regular trials and controversies, stresses and joys, adaptations to change and resistance to change. Then we learn about the unbelievable and try to absorb how it fits into anything we know or can understand.
We spent the morning in the city of Krakow, another city with a huge Jewish population. We visited a beautiful small orthodox shul (The Rama Synagogue) and walked through its beautiful cemetery, which was reconstructed after being destroyed during the Shoah. We heard tales of its famous rabbis and of its regular congregants. We developed a sense of what life was like. Likewise, we visited a Reform synagogue (The Temple) and heard about the beginnings of the reform movement in Krakow and the history of change within Judaism.
We walked through the main thoroughfare that was teeming with Jews prior to the Holocaust, but which now maintains outward signs of Judaism (restaurants with cholent on the menu, stores with Jewish names in the storefront signs, Hebrew writing on the menus), but the Jews themselves are no longer there. The streets are empty.

We heard about and saw signs of some righteous gentiles - the non-Jewish pharmacist that stayed open in the middle of the ghetto and Oscar Schindler's factory. One thing became clear to me - nothing is clear. The Poles were horrible to the Jews and they were also helpful. They stood by or worse when they definitely knew the worst, but they also had the highest number of righteous gentiles ( or gentiles who helped Jews in some way) than any other European country.
And then it was on to Auschwitz. The sheer size of Auschwitz and Birkenau (both part of one huge complex of 40 different complexes) was impossible to take in. 90,000 people could be housed in Birkenau at one time! And it was never finished - plans were there to add more and more to it. The priority was to use us and get rid of us as fast as possible. It is incomprehensible. Unlike Majdanek, Auschwitz was not as it had been then. The outer buildings are standing, but the inside is cleaned up, painted, renovated to a museum. Even with the exhibits, it did not feel like what it was. However, Birkenau still felt like what it was and several of the buildings were reconstructed as they were. Again, as yesterday, I felt a heavy weight descend upon me and it became hard to walk, hard to move, hard to breath. And the same smell as in Majdanek was present in the Birkenau buildings.

And the unanswerable question came up as it has so many times before. How many geniuses did we lose? Could one of those people or their descendants have cured cancer, negotiated world peace, added immeasurably to our world? What would have been the effect on Israel? What a waste.

Posted by Mark Bello
From darkness to light, back to darkness and back to light, only to return to darkness? That is the feeling I had today. Fresh from yesterday’s emotionally difficult visit to the Majdanek death camp in Lublin, our day, today, began with a visit to a 16th century synagogue. There, we freely and joyfully davened shacharit in this place where hundreds of thousands of Jews from happier times probably engaged in the same activity. What a contrast! Next, a visit to the old cemetery next to the synagogue. The cemetery is in very bad shape and was a victim of Nazi vandalism. However, desecrated tombstones were recovered and returned to the cemetery and put to powerful use by the local Jewish community. The cemetery is surrounded by a stone wall; where did the stone come from, you ask? It came from pieces of the desecrated headstones. Thus, that destroyed is suddenly reborn. If the cemetery represents darkness, the rebirth of the stone certainly represents light. Visits to a local pharmacy (now a museum in its and its owner’s honor) in the old Jewish Ghetto of Krakow, and to the Schindler factory where, in both cases, gentiles risked Nazi persecution to assist Jews. For me, these two places crackled with history and represented more light in the darkness.

These visits were shortly followed by a visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau, and return to the darkness. Darkness begins with a terrible feeling, as I enter, that this hallowed ground, where millions met their deaths in unspeakable horror, is being viewed by its curators and its visitors as a theme park. There is a hotel and a hot dog and beer stand on the premises. There are people, everywhere, laughing, joking and taking pictures of themselves, smiling, at the front entrance and in front of gallows. Inside the administration building, a child puts a coin in a coffee vending machine and enjoys the hot chocolate his coins purchased. This experience stands in sharp contrast to the barren and rustic solemnity of Majdanek.

We are greeted by our guide, a local blonde (German looking) who, after introductions, eerily commands: “follow me”. All of us fell into line and followed her and I could not help feeling that someone barked out similar orders over 65 years earlier to my unfortunate brothers and sisters.

We pass through the famous “Arbeit Macht Frei” entrance gate; tourists are taking pictures, smiling. We take a solemn, group photo as we enter. I am struck by a series of exhibits in barrack halls, behind glass partitions. A pre-construction “architectural” drawing of the “planned” crematorium and gas chamber adorns one wall. A mountain of Cyclone B cans, used in the gas chamber death machines are displayed in one room. There are powerful exhibits of a hill of orthopedic limbs, removed from the disabled, before they were brutally murdered for the crimes of being non-Arian and unable to work. Other exhibits contain piles of eye glasses, taleisim, and cooking utensils. Another room houses another mountain, this one is of human hair. And still another houses luggage, carried by prisoners upon their arrival. These bags have names written on them and I can’t help wondering if survivors or family members of lost relatives have seen their family names in this troubling and powerful display.

However, for me, the most powerful expression of the human carnage that is a death camp is found in a simple exhibit of shoes. I was struck, yesterday, by an exhibit of shoes at Majdanek, a barrack full of old, dirty, empty shoes; hundreds of thousands of shoes are on display in a very dark and dingy barrack. They are contained behind a metal grating and parts of them stick out of the grating. I touch them as I walk the endless corridor of shoes and I am “belted in the face” with the realization that with old shoes come real people who once wore them. The Auschwitz exhibit is behind glass and not as horrid as the Majdanek exhibit, but it again “belts me in the face”.

As we step out onto the grounds, I am struck by the sheer enormity of the place. There are barracks as far as the eye can see, and maps and railroad tracks intricately plotting routes from “everywhere in Europe” to this horrible place. Death is all around us as we walk from barrack to barrack and along the railroad tracks, following the routes our brothers and sisters took to their deaths. I am, again, struck with the genius, enormity and peaceful beauty of the setting and can’t help but wonder why such genius and potential beauty could not have been utilized for a good purpose instead of one of unimaginable cruelty. Our walk ends at the end of the tracks; at the beginning of a series of destroyed crematoriums and gas chambers (destroyed by the Nazis and (one) by the Jews at or near liberation day). We learn that thousands at a time were executed in this brutal manner and the process of mass destruction was repeated over and over until millions had perished. Our guide ends her presentation at a memorial for those who perished in the gas chambers and crematoriums and we pray, at the site, for those who perished there. Our walk back to the administration center follows the train tracks and I was moved as I watched you, Rabbi Berkun, discard the travel path and defiantly walk the tracks to freedom. I don’t know if you intended the symbolism, but your “trip” was excitingly symbolic to me.

The bus ride back to the hotel is solemn. I spend the time reading an account of a survivor experience at both of the camps we visited. Others on our trip have commented that you cannot experience what victims experienced without having been at these two horrid places. I respect their opinions, but cannot agree with them. We walked in and out of both camps, freely, without fear. We enjoyed each others’ company; we laughed, cried and prayed together. We volunteered to visit; we were not dragged out of our homes, forced to leave our families and possessions; we were not forced to watch our loved ones terrorized, brutalized and killed before our very eyes; we were not forced to experience fear, starvation, indignity, torture, and, ultimately, death. We left and enjoyed a marvelous dinner at an excellent restaurant named Szara (recommended by our guide-“the best fish soup I have ever tasted; it will knock your socks off”-and he was right!). We returned to our elegant hotel and enjoyed a restful night’s sleep. Visiting these death camps does not help me to “understand their experience”.

As I start to nod off to sleep, I am struck by the ultimate irony: Auschwitz was extremely crowded today. People from different origins, religions, cultures, ethnic backgrounds, life experiences, age groups, and countries all converged on this place. They CHOSE to be at Auschwitz on this beautiful day in May. Over 65 years ago, the same thing happened. People from all over converged on this place, but not of their own free will and certainly not for a “one-day” visit (unless they were immediately murdered). They were dragged out of their homes and piled into overcrowded, unsanitary cattle cars and dumped at this location to be tortured and, in most cases, killed. Indeed, most died of unspeakable atrocities. Others were left with permanent mental and physical scarring. This is, indeed, the ultimate irony.

With deep respect and humility,
Mark.

Posted by Linda and Steve Jacobson
We began the day visiting what was once the center of Jewish life in Krakow, Poland. We said shacharit in the synagogue of the “Rema” - Rabbi Moshe Isserles, but the silence was deafening. Almost an entire town that is like a museum. That is how to describe Krakow. We visited the synagogue of Rabbi Moshe Isserles. We visited the attached cemetery, saw the reform temple, and another synagogue. We saw the sign for the “Jewish Cultural Festival.” Who attends, you might ask? It’s like a tribute to a lost people, but the people still live, just not here. There are remnants in the buildings, the “Jewish style” restaurants, the shops with Jewish names, but none of them have anything to do with Jews, really. They are once holy places without a people to care for them, use them, enjoy them. The large, ornate reform Temple is the host for the opening and closing of the Jewish Cultural Festival. There is a club that plays Klezmer music, but none of the musicians are Jewish. Strange, no? Such an eerie feeling to see.

We left the center of town, following the path of the Jews who once lived here. First we saw the remnant of the ghetto wall, the famous “pharmacy” where one righteous gentile stayed and did what he could to help the Jews of the ghetto. We moved on to see the Oskar Schindler factory, where the fortunate 1,000 or so were able to work and survive the war. That was the end of Krakow proper.

From there we moved out to the countryside, a little over an hour’s drive, to Oswiecim (in Polish), Auschwitz in German. What began in 1940 as a camp for political prisoners from Russia and Poland, soon became hell on earth for all those emptied from its tracks. Auschwitz I is a museum, much the same as it has been since 1947 when it first opened. All that remains of the original camp is the front, the brick buildings, which almost look like college dormitories, belying the unspeakable horrors within their walls. Each building is a living testament, horrific to see, of the unspeakable truth which was the evil of Nazi Germany.

Each “block” depicts the dehumanization of humankind in incomprehensible ways. To see cases and cases of eyeglasses, human hair which was shaved before the women were gassed, hairbrushes, combs, children’s clothing and toys, suitcases with names and addresses, pictures of the early “inmates” tries to show a reality that you can’t even believe is real. The deafening silence crying out from the cases is equaled by the deafening silence of those of us walking through. Why walk through? Read survivor testimony, it must be enough, but yet, it is so incomprehensible even when you see it in front of your eyes that you can’t believe it really happened. The descriptions of tortures, gassing, cremation (which, by the way, was too slow, so bodies were piled onto human pyres of heaps of 1,000 or so,) goes contrary to anything you can possibly imagine other living breathing people (dare I call them that?) could even conceive, of, let alone carry out. Even our museum guide, who I imagine does this on a daily basis, seemed seriously affected each time she spoke. You can only wonder where the rest of the world was.

Where were the leaders of the free world who had the plans and pictures of these atrocities smuggled to them but chose not to stop the atrocities against a ”civilian” population? You see, it was not a “war” problem, but a “civilian” problem. The average life expectancy in Auschwitz I, if you were fortunate enough to be “selected” to “work” could be anywhere from 2 weeks to 6 months. Disease, starvation, torture, the list goes on, were sure ways to a short life. Auschwitz, geographically, was central to all of the other cities in Europe, so the rail lines could conveniently and efficiently deliver victims at a rate of thousands per trainload. At the height of 1944, when Hungary’s Jews were sent to Birkenau, easily 1,000 were gassed at a time, which took only 5 minutes. The disposal of the bodies were much more time consuming, thus the human pyres, which could be smelled and seen for miles.

Auschwitz II, Birkenau stretches further than the eye can see. Most of the actual barracks are gone, but chimneys have been rebuilt on each end of the original foundations so that you can see the magnitude of a place that housed 90,000 prisoners at one time. In the words of a young survivor, in the time it took him to make 3 “throw-ins” on a makeshift soccer field at Birkenau, an entire trainload (3,000) people had been emptied and disappeared, right behind him. These are the ghosts that inhabit the largest cemetery in the world. These are the souls whose lives were so tragically lost for no reason.

Poland, a deafeningly silent graveyard of a vibrant, lost community, not only of Polish Jews, but Polish gentiles, gypsies, eastern European Jewry as it once was. It is a vacant reminder of lives that were, and never will be. It bears witness to families that were never born, lives never completed, hopes and dreams never fulfilled. Yet, here we are, and I believe that as we walk here, we bear witness to the Nazis’ failure, because we are here to tell what happened, and to perpetuate the truth for generations to come.

Y’hei zichronam baruch . . may all their memories always be remembered for a blessing.

Posted by Jules Olsman
There is absolutely no way for a person to prepare for a visit to Auschwitz- Birkenau. No matter how many books to may have read on the Holocaust, no matter how many museums you have visited or the number of movies you have seen, the sheer horror of the camp takes your breath away. The only appropriate words came during Muki's readings and Rabbi Berkun's leading a memorial service at the base of the monument at Birkenau.

Here is a link to photos from Day 3:
http://picasaweb.google.com/jonberkun/Day3KrakowAuschwitzBirkenauMay22007