around the world in 180 days

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.