Not Enough Words for Today

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Geo: 50.0432, 19.2695

As I was waiting for the bus back to Krakow, I kept thinking of what I would be able to say about my visit to Auschwitz today. There was one word that kept running through my brain and that word was Choice.

This morning I had a choice to get up early and get on a bus to visit a place I have wanted to go for years. I had a choice of what I ate for breakfast, what clothes I put on, what shoes I put on, what I put in my bag to bring with me and many other choices that a person normally takes for granted. A bus ride of a little more than an hour brought me to a place where people did not have a choice. They did not choose to go there, they did not choose to do hard labor at Auschwitz I, they did not choose to get off the train at Birkenau and go to a gas chamber or "live" in a horrible wooden hut. Many of those who arrived never again got the choice of what to wear, eat or do with their daily lives. Someone else made all of these choices for them just because they were Jewish or Roma or performed treasonous acts against the Reich or for really no reason at all other than someone somewhere did not like them. How the 7,000 people who were liberated from these places in 1945 managed to "survive" is beyond me. But they did and they again became people who had a choice. One of those choices was to preserve Auschwitz-Birkenau so those who came after them could witness what others chose to do to their fellow human beings. 30 million people have visited so far and I count myself lucky to be one of those people who chose to make the journey to this very important place.

I wanted this post to just be about how I felt as I walked around. See part 2, if you want, for the details of the visit.

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Comments

[Anne]

Very insightful observations. Sadly, there are many places in the world where this is true today.

[MOM]

Excellent post.

[Rachel]

So very well put, Tine. The lack of choice on the part of those poor prisoners, and the choices made by all those responsible for what happened there, are so hard to comprehend. I can only imagine that witnessing such a place puts the very
nature of human choice into sharp relief.

[Patrick]

Choice - or "freedom" - is what we most often take for granted. Until it is denied, it is like the air we breathe. Most of us alive today don't appreciate the threats that lurk like diseases in remission throughout history, and which erup
ted with unbelievable violence in the middle of the 20th century. I have not been to the battlefields and death camps of Europe, but I saw Nazi atrocities on film, which was used as evidence at Nuremberg's post-war trials by the American prosecutor. Those images and possibly more importantly the preserved camps like the one you visited are critical testimonials, aren't they? (For the film angle, see "Hollywood At War" in the New Yorker, March 17, 2014.)