around the world in 180 days

Yesterday we had the distinctive pleasure of meeting and sharing a room with 2 Irish gentlemen from Manchester, Dean and Bob. It was Dean’s 26th birthday and so, by the time we met them, they were both as drunk as Ted Kennedy on the 4th of July (which is to say “barely conscious”). They were both self-described English red-necks and were quite possibly the stupidest people we’ve met who didn’t have some kind of brain injury or deformity to blame it on.

They kept saying things like “I’m not racist, but those damn Pakistanis . . .” I’m no expert on racism, but I’ve found that whenever someone says the words “I’m not racist but . . .” it means that they’re racist pretty much every time. They were also disgusting, belching, farting and grabbing their crotches constantly. At one point, Dean claimed that a person has to be gay to get hired at the BBC. It’s company policy. Of course. He followed it up with the old “I don’t hate gay people. I’ve got gay friends. I just don’t want to partake in their activities.” Yep. You’ve got so many gay friends that you’re worried they’re going to try to rape you.

The next day, Bob asked me for some paracetamol, or aspirin. I told him I had ibuprofen, and when I was getting it, he launched into a bout of classic alcoholic’s remorse. “I was pretty bombed last night. We drank three bottles of vodka, were drinking since 8 in the morning. I don’t know what I said. I’m afraid I made a complete ass of myself. I’m sorry if I said anything that offended you.” Sure, Bob. You’re sorry today, but you’ll do it again tomorrow to some other unlucky soul.

Still, it’s part of the experience. Meeting people is the best thing and the worst thing about staying in hostels. Especially in the places we’ve been in in Hungary and Poland, which are old converted apartments, there is no avoiding the common areas, because there’s no where else to go. Bob and Dean have been far and away the worst we’ve met, but it was fun to make fun of them, but when they were talking to us and yesterday as we walked around town.

We told ourselves it was a good thing we met them, but I still can’t say why. Maybe it shows that idiots aren’t endemic to the USA, that the whole world’s got backward, stupid morons and that most people aren’t like that. It makes you appreciate the quiet ones that spend the evenings with their noses buried in a book or a laptop.

The Nazi death camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau are an 1.5 hour bus ride from Krakow, so we spent yesterday visiting the site of some of the most horrible crimes humanity has ever committed. Auschwitz-Birkenau is the sort of place you go to knowing that you’re not going to have a pleasant day, and it’s not the sort of place you leave with a spring in your step and joy in your heart. All the same, for the terrible crimes and the awful things that happened there, it is located in a pleasant, almost beautiful setting.

Heinrich Himmler chose Auschwitz-Birkenau as a location for the Nazi death camps because of its seclusion from the outside world. It was (and is again) a small town called Oschweim, but the Nazi’s “evacuated” everyone in the area, to remove the witnesses. The camps are surrounded by trees and farmland and if it weren’t for the rows of brick buildings, the ruins of the gas chambers and creamatoria and the throngs of tourists, they might be peaceful places. In some ways, the setting makes everything all the more horrible.

We toured both camps, Auschwitz I, the original camp where the Nazi’s practiced and perfected their killing machines and which houses the bulk of the museum, and Auschwitz II-Birkenau, the camp that was designed and built to carry out the Nazi’s infamous “final solution:” complete liquidation of the Europe’s Jewish populations. 1.5 million people died in both camps during the war and thousands more were scarred for life. The museums covered all aspects of the prisons, including inmate life, prison resistance movements, living conditions, and many other things.

This is difficult to properly convey in writing. The place is both horrible and wonderful; it is something that makes you want to curl up in a ball and give up on humanity and at the same time scream out in joy for the strength the prisoners showed in the face of torture and death. It evokes powerful, complicated feelings, both of revulsion and disgust, but it also makes you wonder where you would have fit in, had you been alive. Would I have fled Germany before the war? Would I have stayed? Would I have served in the army? Followed orders? Tortured people? What if I was in Auschwitz? Would I have been in the resistance or would the constant abuse have crushed my soul and extinguished all hope? I like to think I know the answers to these questions and they’re all noble and great, but I have to admit that it’s impossible to know how anyone will react in such extreme situations. I think we would all be best in praying, passionately and frequently, that such atrocities never happen again.

But the whole time we walked through the prison, I couldn’t help but think that the same sorts of things are happening again, just nowhere near the same level of intensity or monstrousness. We saw cells where Auschwitz inmates were forced to stand for 24 hours at a time and I thought of the terror suspects in Guantanamo, who are also forced to stand for extended periods of time. We saw cells were prisoners were starved to death by Nazis and I thought of those same terror suspects, starving to death (by choice, critical difference, of course) in Guantanamo. Of course of course of course what is going on in Guantanamo is nowhere near as awful and evil as what the Nazi’s did and I don’t mean to suggest anything like that. If Auschwitz is a 10, then Guantanamo is perhaps a 2 or a 3. Still, any movement in that direction is worrying. Anti-muslim hate is growing in the western world and in some areas is being deliberately fostered. Will a politician arise who will use this as a route to power and a route to annihilation?

I sincerely hope not. I don’t expect it. It is, however, something that should be in the back of our minds when we read about places like the US prison in Guantanamo. Auschwitz is a testament to just how horrible human beings can be to other human beings. We must not delude ourselves by thinking this can never happen again. It can and it will, unless us average citizens remember that it is our duty to prevent it.

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