Krakow is not the hometown of
the late Pope John Paul 11, I learnt as the minibus whirred past my hotel
street.
“It’s a village near here,”
explained a guide. “But this is the big city around here, so many associate him
with Krakow.”
Krakow is one of the storied
abodes of history. Its population bustles with tourists, and its central square
preens with spires, rented horses and buggies, open-air restaurants, shops,
lone minstrels and tourists burying themselves in flashlights of photography.
But much of the city’s brio
draws from a dark place. Many of the tourists, like myself, visit because of
Auschwitz, a name hard to spell out by lips and pen. But what is harder still
is the ability of anyone to digest its story.
That was where our minibus was
heading, to Auschwitz, a place of rottenness. It was, simply put, the symbol of
Nazi barbarism during the Second World War, where a phalanx of self-righteous
racists arrogated to themselves the role of a race’s messiah of human purity.
They plotted, first by stealth
and later by open brazenness, to wipe out what French writer Jean Paul Sartre
described as “other people.”
The other people, in this
instance, were primarily Jews. But others included rebellious Poles, Jehovah
Witnesses, dissidents, homosexuals, Gypsies, etc.
The drive from Krakow gulped
an hour and half, but that journey would have filled me with a lot more
anticipation but for the guide’s decision to prepare us with a film of Nazi
horror. Much of the film was familiar to me, having seen quite a few
documentaries, seen movies like the Holocaust series, Escape from Sobibor,
Schindler’s List, The Book Thief, etc. I had also read quite a few books,
fiction and non-fiction, including Kosinski’s The Painted Bird, William
Styron’s Sophie’s Choice, Primo Levi’s If This is a Man and Ann Frank’s Diary,
etc.
I wanted to bear witness after
the fact. Even though the evil happened between 1941 and 1945, I had always
wanted to see Auschwitz for myself, to walk where Nazi jackboots stomped, where
they shot humans at whim, where they burned humans to ashes, where they worked
without profit. There I breathed the air where lawyers, doctors, teachers,
fathers, mothers, children were reduced to sub-humans, lived like pigs, saw
death but could not snatch it, where the devil unveiled the dark side of human
folly.
It is called Auschwitz, but
its original name was in polish, and it was Oswiecim. When the Nazi’s took
over, they did not only want to conquer the place but also its name. So, they
changed the look as well as its sound. From a rustic, quiet, arboreal town, it
became a hovel of cries, lashes, rat-tat of bullets, thuds of dying bodies,
separated families, fear, loathing and foreboding.
Our bus arrived Auschwitz to a
stir of people. My group consisted of about 18 persons. But I saw about at
least six other groups there at about 10 am. We went through security checks,
and met our tour guide, who was a Polish woman. The gate appeared to me like a
barracks portal, and the guide confirmed that the camp was originally a Polish
military barracks.
The Nazis remodeled it in
their image and evacuated the residents. At the gate was written, “Works makes
you free,” in German. It was one of the Nazi deceptions. They wanted to give
the impression that those forcibly tenanted in that rampart were there to work
for profit.
The same deception was cast on
the detainees. They were merely being resettled. So, they packed their
belongings as though to another abode where they would live their normal lives
away from the Nazis. They saw it as relief, but they did not know they were
about to be relinquished. So, they packed their best clothes, jewelry, money.
Some draped themselves in their best fashion. They were rammed into trains with
little air and rode for three and half days in some instances. They had no
place to ease themselves except on themselves.
Auschwitz was located close to
another town called Birkenau. It was there the trains arrived, and it was a
bigger camp. So, the inmates were transferred to hostels in Auschwitz.
We moved from building to
building. We saw an approximately 10-foot high wall, where the stubborn people
were executed. Some earlier visitors placed flowers. There men and women were
lined up and shot, just a yard away from the hostel. Windows overlooked the
wall. The hostel inmates could hear the blast of guns but could not see the
carnage. They were not supposed to see but guess, why bullets blasted the air,
and while voices yelled, whimpered and expired.
They never enjoyed a burial
except as ashes, if they were not dumped into a big ditch and left to rot. An
urn contained remnant ashes secured from the early days after the place was
liberated. It looked like shredded cotton before I looked closer and reminded
me of wood ashes around my grandmother’s cooking pot. I looked away.
Not far from there were masses
of human hair. My mind zipped to the craze for human hair in Nigeria, and the
contrast stared me in the face. The heaps of hair were shaved from the inmates
once they arrived the camp. They used them to make beds and different sorts of
clothing. It was classic humiliation to the Jews, especially men whose beards
were sometimes as holy as their Torah.
Next were their shoes, of
various sizes and in that glass display were thousands of pairs of shoes. I
wondered those who wore them, when they bought them. A girl probably once used
those shoes to impress a date, received it as a birthday present, a guy
probably had it for a graduation party, etc. Today, it is a symbol of absence
and butchery.
The hostel was brutal. They
inmates slept on double-bunk beds and on mattresses made from hair. The
mattresses were arranged neatly as though it were a dark sort of comfort. The
hostels were narrow, and leg room was luxury. The toilets had no privacy and
the bowls, cracked and slimy, made you retch. Yet, no one was allowed to use
the toilets except early in the morning before work and late at night after
work.
Anyone who was pressed in
between had to wait or face the repercussions. One of them was a starvation
room. The inmate would lie in the cell without food or water until he or she
died. A polish priest, Maximillien, volunteered on behalf of another man and survived
the starvation room for about two weeks. The Nazis were not impressed. They
killed him. The priest has been canonised.
Other than the starvation
room, there was the standing room, where the victim stood without the ability
to sit or stoop, for days until he or she expired or served a specific term.
Others were simply paraded at the wall of death and executed.
As we walked by the toilets
and bathroom, the guide quoted a woman, Esra Pollack,
“Man has created horrors but
cannot find the words to describe.”
The most chilling horror was
when we stood in the gas chambers. Shower heads hung on the ceilings as promise
of a normal bath. But it was a parody that ended in gas that turned into waves
of fire that gutted the naked bodies at once. A few yards away was an
incinerator that converted flesh to ashes. The ashes were used as fertilizers
and the rest dumped in ponds or rivers. Like a peacock, a few metres away,
stood a gated mansion.
“That’s the home of the camp
commandant,” said the guide. The place was a contrast. We never entered the
mansion, and I wondered why. The sight of the luxury where the chief butcher
enjoyed the higher comforts with his family was probably enough after all the
horrors we had seen in a two-hour walk. We were told that no one survived the
camp for more than six months, and those were few.
In Poland, there were other
camps as well, but this was the most notorious. About 800 attempted escapes but
only 144 succeeded and they thrived till the end of the war. With the high
walls, the barbed wires, the high tower watches, the 24-hour vigilance, the
regular roll calls, it was amazing that some people escaped or even dared.
Most of the year was in
freezing weather, sometimes minus 20 degree Celsius, more than many
refrigerators. Although this was Poland, the majority of inmates were Hungarian
Jews. Inside Poland, the Nazis killed 2.3 million Jews and about two million
others sent to other camps, some inside Germany.
We moved less than twenty
minutes away to Birkenau, which was a bigger camp. There the refugees arrived.
We saw the train coaches, the rump of the rail lines, and the area where the
arrivals were sorted out. The women and children were separated from the men
who were seen as healthy. The so-called weak men were lumped with the women and
children. The fit men went to the hostels while the “unfit” were consigned to
the concentration camp.
As the war came to an end, the
Nazis destroyed much of the evidence like the gas chambers and hostels. But the
marks were unmistakable. One of the chilling reminders was the room where
doctor Mengele operated. He slaughtered humans for experiment to make the
perfect Aryan race. The man escaped and lived many years later and was never
discovered until he drowned in Latin America.
It
was over, but for the rest of the day, I had to concentrate on the nature of
human evil.
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