Krakow, Poland, and Auschwitz
This trip has been amazing, and exhausting, and amazing some more. Not surprisingly, it’s knocked my plans to blog regularly off a bit.
I’m writing this en route back to the US, the travel for my Marshall Fellowship now coming to an end. However, this has also given me time to reflect a bit. So, with that…. Back to Poland.
I think it’s safe to say our group had low expectations for Poland – sadly, we all had visions of Soviet-era concrete buildings, drab landscapes, a beaten-down place. Nothing could be further from the truth.
We arrived in Krakow first. It’s a beautiful city, simply gorgeous. The town is dominated by a gorgeous castle, the Wawel Castle, which dates from the 1500s . Krakow was, happily, spared destruction during World War II, so it also has the largest city square in Europe, an amazing place surrounded by sidewalk cafes and hosting regular markets, performers, and the like. We began our time in Krakow with a liter of hot beer – yes, hot beer, mulled similarly to wine (with, I believe, cinnamon, cloves, an orange, and some honey). It was deliciously perfect on a snappily-cold day. The Old Town city center is also surrounded by a gorgeous green belt, with two walking trails and full of people nearly ‘round the clock. Simply put, it’s a lovely city.
While there, we met with an American-Polish professor, who filled us in on Polish life and history of the last few decades. We also shared drinks with the professor and a few of her students, which was great, giving us further context for the current situation in Poland.
Below are some photos of and from the castle, and one in the main square.
(Warning: this blog post from here on out is a bit heavy)
Closing out our stay in Krakow, we visited Auschwitz-Berkenau. As students of history know, this was one of the worst of the Nazi concentration/extermination camps. Auschwitz was the parent camp for approximately 40 camps of varying sizes and purposes; some were pure concentration camps – places prisoners (mostly Jews) were sent to live while working for the Nazi war effort. Others were closer to pure extermination camps, their purpose being fairly obvious. We heard awful stories of the methods, the severity, the extent of the exterminations, and needles
s to say, it was horrible. We visited both Auschwitz and Birkenau, the former a relatively small (but brutal) place, the latter an enormous complex that at its height had five gas chambers and crematoriums running beyond capacity.
I have visited a concentration camp before, Dachau, in Germany. It was, in some ways, similar – impressing upon me the horrendous atrocities committed to so many. It was emotionally draining and memorable. However, our tour guide left me with something far more substantive on this trip. Specifically, he pointed out the following:
People visit these camps and see the atrocities, learn the stories, and seek meaning. In most cases, they seek that meaning through empathizing with the victims – a very human response. However, he continued, it is crucial, indeed arguably more important, to try to understand the motivations, the emotions, of the Nazis themselves – for it is only through this understanding, through gaining some sense of how the Holocaust came to pass, that humanity can ever hope to put an end to genocide everywhere.
Our guide continued by pointing out that there are four behaviors that lead to genocide (prepare here for oversimplification, of course): having a national culture that does not place a high value on human life; identifying a group, seen as not quite fully human, as the “other;” vilification of the “other” by the mainstream society, devaluing their lives; and finally, people willing to undertake the extermination of the “other” (by that point, the only “solution” to the problem of the “other”). Obviously, as he went on to point out, not everyone can stop genocide… but we can stop violence directed toward others in all its forms – whether in the form of domestic violence, racial violence, or by supporting organizations working for human rights across the globe.
His point really hit home for me; as I thought about it, I realized that I wanted to believe that somehow the circumstances of that time – an economically depressed Germany, an incredibly charismatic, morally-bankrupt and convincing leader (Hitler) with some equally morally-corrupt lieutenants, that somehow these circumstances were unique, and thus, couldn’t happen again. Of course, anyone knows it not only can happen again, but it has – to wit, the Cambodian genocide under Pol Pot, or the genocide in the Balkans in the 1990s. Indeed, as I’ve previously noted, the term “genocide” was coined to describe the Ottoman annihilation of the Armenians (though that particular piece of history is still debated by some in Turkey).
History continues; we must all be witnesses and provide voices for those without. While this has been repeated many times, it is worth remembering the following quote:
“They came first for the Communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for me and by that time no one was left to speak up."
Below are some photos from Auschwitz, including of the end of the train tracks where incoming prisoners (mainly Jews) were divided for either work or immediate extermination (by one of the gas chambers).
