Auschwitz

With two weeks before the commencement of my new job, I was presented with yet another opportunity to jump aboard the 'Explore Europe' Train.

A dear friend of mine from University, Jessica Schul, had the time off as well, so she flew over to stay with me in London for a few days before packing our bags and jet-setting to Krakow.

I travelled to Warsaw and Gdansk the summer of 2012 with Catherine, but was in quite the opposite state of mind from the relaxed beach vacation mode of the previous trip. This time I was here to see Auschwitz.

Auschwitz Limits

My grandparents on my mother's side were Polish, and although my Jaja (polish for Grandfather) passed away before my birth, my Baba played an influential part in my upbringing.  As both of my parents worked full-time in my youth, she turned into a second mother to me and I loved her as much as my own.

She was not your typical grandmother figure- full of kisses, and cheek pinches.  No, she had a tough love about her, and certain quirks I didn't come to fully understand until I heard the horror story that had encompassed the vast majority of her life.  Born in 1924, she grew up in the rural area of Horyniec, a city in Northwest Poland.  At 16 years of age, she was taken from her family in the middle of the night by Nazi soldiers after they invaded.  She was given a choice to continue to work in the countryside by helping a German family, or travel to the city to be a source of cheap labour there.  She chose the country side, which may have saved her life as many of the Polish city workers eventually were deported to concentration camps.  She never saw her parents again after that night.

I tried many times to extract her entire story, but it was a difficult subject for her to open; after a few minutes of mental retreat to this part of her life it would prove too difficult of a task. Her eyes would glaze over, and her expression would harden, and then the tears welled and fell.  I never pressed her past this point, and therefore only conjured up fragments what she experienced.

The wife of a Nazi soldier she worked for during the early days of her capture was a registered nurse, and as cunning of a lady my Baba was, she quickly and slyly learnt all she could about this practice.  On a separate round of labour recruitment, she lied and said she was a nurse,  which led to her placement of working in a nearby hospital under much better living conditions and most probably saved her from being sentenced to a concentration camp.

I'll never forget walking back from one of our morning trips to the grocery store in my childhood. We were walking along the sidewalk and she looked at me and said in her thick Polish accent, "You have no idea how lucky you are to live in Canada.  When I was a kid, I would walk down the street and there would be explosions everywhere!  You see that bush over there? One day I was walking and turned to see a mangled arm in the bush right next to me, just like that one!  Body parts were everywhere in the streets back then."

We both walked the rest of the way home in silence, Baba lost in her horrible memories, and myself in dumfounded confusion derived from sheltered childhood innocence.

Baba remained the mentally and physically strong woman she was until the end of her life on November 14, 2008.

I've always carried an intrinsic curiosity around the second world war, and spent many sleepless nights through my teenage years reading the entire collection of Carol Matas novels under the covers.  I'd learned a great deal about the holocaust through literature, but couldn't fully wrap my head around the reality it's nightmare. Not that I doubted it's occurrence as too many do- it was more like someone was trying to convince me the Boogeyman existed from their first hand accounts with him.  You know their story is true, you believe them, but it's difficult to fathom until you see it for yourself.

Auschwitz

Auschwitz is an hour's drive east of Krakow.  Jess and I bought tickets for the morning shuttle, and rode in silence for the majority of the trip- staring out into the desolate landscape, covered in a thin layer of grey snow, with the occasional patch of tall lifeless grass protruding through.

We pulled up to the entrance of the museum, purchased our tickets for the next English tour and congregated outside near the camp entrance gates.  A pretty middle-aged woman with long dark hair matching the colour of her expressionless eyes greeted us after a few minutes and introduced herself as our guide.

I don't think I will ever have the same amount of respect for anyone after realising what the job description of an Auschwitz guide entails.  It's difficult enough to experience the camp for a few hours, but these courageous people have dedicated the majority of their lives to study this horrendous event, and carried on to re-live it everyday of their working career.  That is philanthropy carried to a whole new level.  I would have thought that after a time you would become desensitised to the environment as a defence mechanism to safeguard your emotional well-being, but that wasn't apparent in our guide- as she appeared a broken spirit.

I was in a state of shock the entire tour.  Even with the sun shinning brightly on the cloudless day, a dark somber aura encompassed the entire camp, like a dense fog that would not dissipate.  It followed me through the barracks where they had once crammed 25 people into the space that wouldn't comfortable fit 4.   It followed me through the gas chambers, where hundreds of thousands of victims were promised a warm shower as reward for their hard labour before being brutally executed by choking to death on toxic air.  It followed me through the crematorium, where they began burning bodies after realising the mounds of cadavers were becoming too large and inconvenient to bury.

Railroad into the Camp

I had remained composed during most of the tour, but when we entered the barracks that had been converted into an exhibition on the possessions confiscated from the victims,  it pushed me over the edge.  In the first showcase were thousands of shoes piled into a mound.  The shoes they had stepped off the train with on their first day of arrival into Auschwitz- the beginning of the end.   Each pair of shoes was once worn by an innocent victim, and more than a million victims met their unjust end in this camp.

Another showcase was dedicated to the precious metals derived from the dental work of the victims. That's right- their teeth.  After committing murder, Nazi's would inspect their victims mouth for fillings as sometimes these were done using gold or silver.  If any were discovered, they would be ripped from their mouth, melted down, and traded.

I was overcome with a wave of nausea, and as I turned to get some fresh air I came face to face with showcase number 3:  Human Hair.  The actual hair shaved from the victims head, again, on their day of arrival.  A pile so large the showcase covered the entire wall of the barrack.  This was the room that would haunt me.  This was the room that everything unfathomable about Auschwitz was given a direct meaning.  The number of casualties that I couldn't wrap my head around, was put into context right before my eyes, and the realisation of it was too much for me to handle.

Visiting Auschwitz was the most emotionally trying day of my life, and as so many have said before me- it's not something I will ever do again, but it is something that has to be done once.

Many thanks to Jessica Schul for sharing this experience with me.  It means a lot to have a hand to hold and a shoulder to cry on during your visit.