Auschwitz

Two weeks ago, I stood in a room where literally thousands of people, all of whom believed that they were being decontaminated after a long train ride, were systematically executed.  I peered inside the furnaces where bodies were burned one after the other.  Occasionally, bodies not completely dead were placed inside.  I looked out over the fields and into the woods where the ashes were dumped.  

Somewhere between the room full of human hair, used for manufacturing industrial textiles, and the towering piles of suitcases, all meticulously labeled by owners believing they would be reunited with their belongings in the not too distant future, there is a lesson to be learned at Auschwitz.  I suppose the lessons most people receive are: “Hate has no excuse,” or “Unless we remember the atrocities of the past, history is doomed to repeat itself.”  I don’t disagree with either of these statements… but I guess the realization that affected me most was “I am no different.”  I am no different from the Jews, gypsies, and protesters who lived their last days packed with hundreds of others inside houses of wooden beds frames and overflowing stone latrines.  I am no different from the children who were beaten bloody because of the beliefs of their parents.  I am no different from the doctors who conducted fertility experiments on women in cold dark rooms.  I am no different from the Nazi soldiers who, when the experiments failed, lined the women up against a stone wall and shot them in the back of the head.  Somewhere inside me is the ability to withstand excruciating humiliation and agony.  Somewhere inside me in the capacity to inflict incomprehensible pain and suffering upon others.

My greatest disappointment that weekend came in the fact that I wasn’t more viscerally affected by the things I saw.  As an American who has sat through a great number of Holocaust lessons in grade school, perused the pages of Anne Frank’s diary, walked through the halls of the Holocaust Memorial in Washington D.C., and watched hours of concentration camp dramatizations like “Schindler’s List” or “Life is Beautiful,” I have been exposed to these atrocities before.  However, three specific things stand out in my mind for which I was not prepared.  First, the room full of human hair and the products made from this hair in an adjacent display.  Second, the sheer size of Auschwitz II was astounding to me.  A brisk walk from the main front gate to the ruins of the rear furnaces takes nearly 20 minutes.  Third, the moment I realized that for all of the first-hand accounts of the suffering that went on behind those walls, there are thousands of men and women who committed these crimes who go unrecognized as criminals by their families and neighbors.  I can only assume that during the last two years here, or in the 22 years prior, I have walked past former Nazi soldiers or family members on the street, stood next to them in a grocery store line, or worshipped with them in church.  But we never hear those stories.