a) Upscale New England Neighbourhood
b) Trendy Condo Development
c) Jew Death Camp
If you guessed 'c', you're absolutely right. Genocide had a surprisingly pretty face. Beautiful brick buildings on little avenues lined with old trees not too far from a pretty little town by the name of Oswiecim.
A starbucks and a Mongolian Grill wouldn't have looked too out of place, but unfortunately, while they did a lot of cooking here, they never quite got around to Mongolians.
While a lot of what I saw was disturbing: the room containing 1,800kg of women's hair which the Nazis used to make textiles, the baby's clothing piled up in mounds, the 1m x 1m standing cells in which 4 prisoners were kept for weeks on end and the rooms in which medical experiments were carried out by Nazi doctors, I left quite unaffected by it all. Maybe it's because I'm callous, irreverant, insensitive, but a lifetime of horror stories, a lifetime of being primed that this was the most sinister and horrific place on earth left me confused when I stepped over the gates and wasn't smacked in the face by a palpable wave of evil. Shouldn't I have shuddered when I crossed the gates? Why didn't I get the goosebumps? Instead, I saw the sun setting on what could have easily been a pretty little neighbourhood of historic buildings anywhere in the world.
I wasn't about to be coerced into manufacturing regret and sorrow I wasn't really feeling, so I left Auschwitz, passing the souvenir hut and the hot dog stand ready to go home and contemplate my reaction, when Laurence insisted that we go to Birkenau, a.k.a. Auschwitz II which was 3km away. Birkenau was a death camp on a much larger scale, it was where all the exterminations really happened. When we got there, I witnessed a sight so stark, so lifeless and so massive that I was overwhelmed. It stretched nearly as far as we could see on each side. Bleak, cold and endless. A manifestation of an archetypal nightmare. Everything fell into place for this to affect me deeply. The sun was setting, I wasn't dressed for this occasion, I was too cold and hungry for a walk through this camp. This wasn't a musuem, this was a ruin and we were nearly alone. Standing over the rubble that was once the gas chambers, my feet no more than a meter away from where nearly 1.5 million people were murdered was a bizarre feeling that I didn't experience in a moment, but something i've experienced over the last few days. My interpretation of it has continued to develop, grow and change in my mind. This was a murder factory. The photos of prisoners who died in Auschwitz all looked the same. Shaved head, hollow face, dead eyes. All looked exactly the same. These weren’t people.
As we walked back, it was becoming very dark and we snuck through the barbed wire fences and walked around the remains of the hundreds of barracks which contained desperate prisoners years ago, those that weren't gassed right away and instead were worked, frozen and starved to death.
One thing was certain. It was time for a kebab.
"Work Makes You Free". Who could have known that my life philosophy could be twisted in this way.
Good fences make good neighbours.
Irony.
1800kg of fine Auschwitz hair. It's eco-conscious, but that does make it right?
Break dancing for extra bread rations. The baby freeze saved my life.
Tunnel of death in bunker 11. This was where prisoners were often killed, tortured and experimented on.
For the homeboys that didn't make it. I'll always remember you, Jewish 50 cent.
Freedom. Not all of us made it out. Thank god for my Aryian good looks.
Birkenau sunset.
Gas chamber and crematorium 1. The germans destroyed it in the final weeks of the camp to hide the evidence.
Final view of Birkenau's specially made train tracks leading to the gas chambers.
The kebabs that could have saved so many. The tzatziki alone could have saved hundreds.
