I've spent the last three days visiting concentration camps, and it seems like I should write something, but I don't know where to start. On Sunday we visited Terezin (also known as Theresienstadt), near Prague. On Monday we woke up early and took a bus to Oswiecim, the Polish town where Auschwitz is located. We spent Monday afternoon at Auschwitz I, the part of the camp where people went to work, and we spent Tuesday morning at Auschwitz-Birkenau, a few miles away, the part of the camp where people went to die.
I have always heard about the horrors of the Holocaust, and have always understood that many many individuals were killed. But before now, I only really thought about it in individual terms. I don't think I understood until this trip just how effective it was at wiping away entire populations of people. This first hit me visiting Prague, where we saw many synagogues and few Jews. Prague is a city filled with magnificent synagogues (not even counting the ones that were destroyed), but most of them are museums because there are hardly any Jews left to use them. There is a giant Jewish quarter, but it is a tourist destination, not a center of Jewish life. Prague used to have one of the largest Jewish populations of any city in Europe. Our guide told us that now there are 6000 Jews in the whole city. To make sense of this number, I looked up the Jewish population of Seattle, a city I think of as having hardly any Jews (I grew up there without meeting anyone I knew to be Jewish until high school). Seattle has half the total population of Prague but has 60,000 Jews. In Poland before the war there were 3.25 million Jews. 2.93 million Polish Jews were killed in the Holocaust. The Polish Jewish population was literally decimated. There are now 25,000 Jews all of Poland. There are half as many Jews in the entire country of Poland as in the city of Seattle. In Auschwitz we learned more about how this came to be. Auschwitz was the only camp that had both a death camp and a work camp in the same place. There were 4 other camps in Poland that were only death camps. Auschwitz has become the symbol of the Holocaust because there were so many survivors who witnessed what happened there. Hardly anyone survived from the death camps. The Nazi leadership decided on January 20 1942 to enact the final solution to systematically kill all of Europe's Jews in death camps. When our guide told us that the other 4 death camps were all dismantled and the evidence of them destroyed in December 1942, we were all perplexed and asked why. He said because they were finished; they had already killed all of Poland's Jews. Auschwitz continued to function to kill the Jews from other countries, but there were none left in Poland. It took 11 months to wipe out the nearly entire Jewish population of Poland, 3 million people. It feels very different being here than in the US. The US is filled with Jews who escaped, survived, prospered, and grew. In the US, Judaism feels very much alive. Here it feels dead. I know that the rest of our trip is intended to help us see that it is not dead by introducing us to the thriving Jewish communities of Poland. I am glad we have the rest of the trip and I hope it will be convincing. But just looking at the numbers, right now it's hard for me to see the Polish Jewish community as anything but barely hanging on.
Gerardo, our trip leader who lived in Poland for 20 years and was an active member of the revitalization of Jewish life in Poland, told me a story about the March of the Living, which is an annual trip for Jewish teenagers from around the world. They spend a week in Poland visiting concentration camps, culminating in a march from Auschwitz I to Auschwitz-Birkenau carrying the flags of their countries. In Poland they see only death. Then they go to Israel for a week, where they only what is alive, positive, and good about Israel. There is definitely a political agenda here. Gerardo said his teenage son went on March of the Living a few years ago, and couldn't believe it when the bus passed right by the Yiddish Theater and the Museum of New Jewish Culture and no one said anything, so he stood up and started pointing them out and telling everyone how his father had been in the Yiddish Theater and how there was a thriving Jewish Culture in Poland. He was asked to sit down. The participants weren't allowed to leave the hotel and they didn't let Gerardo's son go out to have lunch with his brothers who lived in Poland until Gerardo intervened, and then only grudgingly. I am disgusted by this story and don't want to draw the same conclusions that this group is working so hard to promote by deception. But looking at the facts, I'm finding it hard to draw any other conclusions. Perhaps I need to lower my expectations, and instead of hoping to revive the incredibly rich culture that is mostly dead, appreciate the tiny shoots of life that exist, however small they may be.
Our guide at Terezin was Sylvie Wittmann, who is a leader in the Prague Jewish community and runs her own tour company specializing in Jewish history. Normally she sends out her minions to give tours, but she gave us three days of her own time to take us all over Prague and finally to to Terezin. She was very blunt and always prefaced her best insights with, "I don't want to be politically incorrect... ah, OK, I will be politically incorrect."
Terezin was known as the "model concentration camp." It was not as bad as the others, children lived there, and they had schools, music, theater, and art. The Red Cross came to visit in 1944, and the Nazis went to great effort to clean up the camp (mainly by shipping large numbers of inmates off to Auschwitz) and put on a show to convince the Red Cross that life was good here. It worked. They also made a propaganda film showing how great life was there. Most of the people in the film were shipped off to Auschwitz within a few weeks after the film was made. Terezin was of course upsetting but it was not that bad. Not much was left of what it originally looked like, so mostly what we saw was a museum, and not a particularly intense one. Writing this now, after visiting Auschwitz, I'm having trouble remembering it.
One thing that stood out at Terezin was a "secret synagogue," so secret that none of the survivors Sylvie has talked to remember it. It is covered with inscriptions in Hebrew, not typical religious ones, but religious Zionist slogans. Sylvie said this was considered very dangerous by the Nazis. They encouraged displays of religiosity because it encouraged people to put their faith in God and not fight back. This was exactly the kind of place that encouraged people to fight.
Our guide at Auschwitz was Tomasz Cebulski, and I think he must be the best Auschwitz guide on the planet, although he is overqualified for the job and I feel incredibly privileged that our little group gets to have three days of his time. He grew up in Oswiecim and wrote his PhD dissertation on "State Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau and the socio-political conditions of its functioning." He has dedicated his life to understanding this place and what it means for us today, and to communicating what he has learned. Although Tomasz said he tries to present what is here without an agenda, I don't believe this is possible. Everyone has an agenda. His agenda is to help us see that the Nazis were not monsters, but ordinary people, and that all human beings are capable of these atrocities, that such atrocities continue to this day, and our only hope is to confront this capacity within ourselves. He also has a agenda of educating us about the ways in which businesses profited from Auschwitz and were involved in every aspect of its functioning, and how the Nazis set up the concentration camps so that the prisoners did the most awful work, allowing themselves psychological distance from the atrocities. And he very gently reminded us that we are still doing both of these things.
The first shocking and unexpected thing about Auschwitz was that there is a mid-sized city right next to it, and people live out their lives there. On the way to the camp, we passed a shopping mall, a McDonalds, and the largest sign I've ever seen for KFC. There was also a billboard advertising "Peaceful Oswiecim," with pictures highlighting the many wonderful attractions of the town. There were houses lined up right next to the barbed wire fence of Auschwitz-Birkenau. None of us could imagine how anyone could live in such a place. We learned that the Nazis expelled anyone who lived within 40 miles of the camp, so this entire city has been populated since the war. Tomasz told us that no Jews live in Oswiecim. The last Jew there, a survivor who wanted to come back to his home town, died in 2000. Tomasz expects that one day Jews will live there again. The rest of us were skeptical and couldn't imagine that any Jew would ever live here again. There is a synagogue, but it is only used by visitors.
In Auschwitz I, I was mostly holding it together until we came to a display of children's clothes, shoes, and toys. It was a tiny display and you had to look over it to see what it was. As soon as I saw it, I broke down crying. I kept trying to go back to it and take it in, but I couldn't look at it. I could only glance at it out of the corner of my eye. I also had to rush quickly through the exhibit of children's drawings from Terezin, many of which were of things children shouldn't have to witness. I just couldn't be with them.
In Auschwitz-Birkenau, the most shocking thing was the sheer vastness of it all. At its peak there were 120,000 prisoners. Tomasz emphasized the orderliness of the process from the perspective of the Nazis, who were constantly refining the system into the well-oiled machine, and the randomness of it from the perspective of the prisoners, who by the time they understood it, they were dead. He also emphasized the amazing capacity of humans to adapt. While most prisoners at Auschwitz died within 2 months, there were a few who arrived in 1940 and were still alive when the camp was liberated in 1945.
Another shocking thing about both camps was how beautiful they were. Auschwitz is in the middle of a beautiful forest, surrounded by lovely trees. Auschitz I had spruce trees growing throughout the camp, birds chirping, and a peaceful woodsy feeling. Auschwitz-Birkenau was more sparse. There is grass now, but in the 40s it was only mud. But even there, through the barbed wire fence, all around is a lovely forest.
The gas chambers and crematoria were all blown up by the Nazis before the camp was liberated, in an ineffective attempt to hide the evidence, so all we saw at Auschwitz-Birkenau was rubble, but the rubble showed enough. Tomasz explained how Jewish prisoners handled all the dirty work. The only piece of the process that the Nazis did themselves was inserting the canisters in Zyklon B into the gas chambers. This was the one piece that couldn't be trusted to the Jewish prisoners. Once prisoners started working in this section of the camp, they were carefully tracked and marked for death, never allowed to interact with the rest of the prisoners again.
There were teenagers behaving horribly at Auschwitz-Birkenau, taking silly selfies, laughing, and chasing each other with insects on sticks. I found myself getting irritated with them, and with people in my group who I didn't think were behaving in an appropriately respectful way. I had to just keep telling myself that all these things were coping mechanisms, and everyone was doing the best they could in the face of something that is impossible to comprehend. In the end, I wasn't really upset with the teenagers, but upset with their guide, who hadn't done a good enough job of teaching them how to behave in a place like this.
Towards the end of the visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau, perhaps as my own kind of coping mechanism, I found myself consumed of thoughts of what I could do to take my experience of this place and turn it into something meaningful that would make a difference for the world. The numbers really impacted me, and since my work is in data visualization, I started imagining creating various visualizations of the numbers that would help make them more real to people. Tomasz talked about how when people first started talking about the Holocaust, as they do with every genocide, they focused on the numbers, but people couldn't connect with numbers alone, so then they started focusing on individual stories. So I started imagining interactive visualization of numbers where you could zoom in until you got to individuals and individual stories. I started thinking about how I could use my skills in data visualization to tell stories about all sorts of politically relevant issues, and started wishing I were independently wealthy so I could just do whatever matters instead of whatever the NSF would fund. I don't know whether these ideas will last or go anywhere past this trip, but these visits are definitely contributing to a growing feeling that ultimately I need to do something that matters more for the world than creating assessment resources for physics faculty.
After both days at Auschwitz, we got together as a group to process and talk about what was coming up for us. This was exactly what I wished I had after visiting the Holocaust museum, and I was grateful to have it. After both days, we were all completely emotionally exhausted. But it was good to be around other people who have been through the same thing.
There is so much more I could say, but I will stop here because I am too tired to say more.
Added on Wednesday:
A few more things I forgot to write about...
I've always had trouble wrapping my head around why, when the Red Cross came to visit Terezin, not a single person ran up to the Red Cross delegates and yelled, "This is all lies! It's all a show!" and explained what was really going on. Anyone who did this would have been punished brutally, but they were all going to be killed anyway, so why not? Of course the answer is that they didn't know they were all going to be killed anyway, and even if they did, they still might not have wanted to take the risk of a punishment worse than death. But it's still hard for me to wrap my head around. Yesterday we learned that at its peak, there were 120,000 prisoners in Auschwitz-Birkenau, and only 2700 SS officials. For someone on the outside, this raises the same question of why they didn't revolt. Even if the SS officials had guns and the prisoners didn't, if every prisoner in Auschwitz revolted, they could have overwhelmed them with sheer numbers. But of course the Nazis had set up a careful system to turn the prisoners against each other and keep each other in check. And then it hit me that this is the same as all sorts of power systems today, including our own government, where incredibly small numbers of elite keep incredibly large numbers of people from revolting. Revolt is hard, but it is often effective. Over the last few days, we've learned repeatedly about incidents in which the Nazis waited to see if the international community would object before committing the worst atrocities, and proceeded only after they heard no objections. When several Jews who were married to non-Jews were deported to concentration camps, their non-Jewish spouses stood outside the Nazi offices protesting, and after several days of protest, the Jewish spouses were released. After the Red Cross visit to Terezin, the Danish government, which was at that point occupied by Nazi Germany, insisted that their Danish citizens be sent home, and hundreds of Danish Jews were actually sent home from Terezin. It amazes me how often the Nazis responded when people protested, and how infrequently people protested.
I've noticed that within our small group of supposedly spiritual evolved people, all sorts of interpersonal issues have been coming up, and they were exacerbated in Auschwitz, probably because of the intensity of the place. It made me realize how much worse it must have been for people who were prisoners here. In addition to all the other horrible things they were experiencing, the intensity of the place must have triggered so much in their interactions with each other.
Another thing I learned on this trip that I hadn't realized was that no one talked about the Holocaust for 30 years after the war. The experience was so extreme that no one could understand what survivors were talking about. When they did talk, people thought they were crazy, so they quickly learned to shut up. This was especially true in Israel. Even though a third of the Israeli population after the war was Holocaust survivors, their experience as victims didn't fit with the popular Israeli narrative of heroism, and they were shamed for their experience. According to Tomasz, it was only in the late 70s and early 80s that people began to start talking about the experience of the Holocaust, asking questions of survivors, doing research, and writing books. By that time many survivors had been so thoroughly trained to shut up, that it was hard to get them to talk. There was a huge production of books that came out in the 80s. That was exactly the period when I, as a very young child, was reading every book I could find about the Holocaust, and Olivier said he was too. It had not occurred to either of us that this was a generational thing, and that our interest was part of a larger cultural phenomenon that was just beginning, and that these books hadn't existed until that moment.
After the SPU shooting, I wrote here about how impressed I was with the university's response, and how I realized that we know so much now about trauma education, and that the trauma counselors at SPU knew exactly how to support us in this situation and help us realizing that we weren't crazy and everything we were experiencing was normal. Without that support, I really would have thought I was crazy. I can't even imagine what it must have been like for Holocaust survivors, who after experiencing something far more traumatic, had none of this, and couldn't even talk about their experience.
This reminded me of the sermon in the service after the SPU shooting, about how everyone reads Psalm 23 after a tragedy, because it is comforting, but they don't remember that before Psalm 23 comes Psalm 22, which is all about despair. The conclusion was that we should not rush to comfort too quickly, but must first sit with the despair. I shared this with my group, and we read Psalm 22. It felt incredibly relevant to Auschwitz.
Finally, here is Olivier's blog post about the same few days, which captures a lot of what I wasn't able to say: http://www.betalef.org/2015/05/jewish-heritage-tour-of-czech-poland-day-fourfive-auschwitz-birkenau/
I have always heard about the horrors of the Holocaust, and have always understood that many many individuals were killed. But before now, I only really thought about it in individual terms. I don't think I understood until this trip just how effective it was at wiping away entire populations of people. This first hit me visiting Prague, where we saw many synagogues and few Jews. Prague is a city filled with magnificent synagogues (not even counting the ones that were destroyed), but most of them are museums because there are hardly any Jews left to use them. There is a giant Jewish quarter, but it is a tourist destination, not a center of Jewish life. Prague used to have one of the largest Jewish populations of any city in Europe. Our guide told us that now there are 6000 Jews in the whole city. To make sense of this number, I looked up the Jewish population of Seattle, a city I think of as having hardly any Jews (I grew up there without meeting anyone I knew to be Jewish until high school). Seattle has half the total population of Prague but has 60,000 Jews. In Poland before the war there were 3.25 million Jews. 2.93 million Polish Jews were killed in the Holocaust. The Polish Jewish population was literally decimated. There are now 25,000 Jews all of Poland. There are half as many Jews in the entire country of Poland as in the city of Seattle. In Auschwitz we learned more about how this came to be. Auschwitz was the only camp that had both a death camp and a work camp in the same place. There were 4 other camps in Poland that were only death camps. Auschwitz has become the symbol of the Holocaust because there were so many survivors who witnessed what happened there. Hardly anyone survived from the death camps. The Nazi leadership decided on January 20 1942 to enact the final solution to systematically kill all of Europe's Jews in death camps. When our guide told us that the other 4 death camps were all dismantled and the evidence of them destroyed in December 1942, we were all perplexed and asked why. He said because they were finished; they had already killed all of Poland's Jews. Auschwitz continued to function to kill the Jews from other countries, but there were none left in Poland. It took 11 months to wipe out the nearly entire Jewish population of Poland, 3 million people. It feels very different being here than in the US. The US is filled with Jews who escaped, survived, prospered, and grew. In the US, Judaism feels very much alive. Here it feels dead. I know that the rest of our trip is intended to help us see that it is not dead by introducing us to the thriving Jewish communities of Poland. I am glad we have the rest of the trip and I hope it will be convincing. But just looking at the numbers, right now it's hard for me to see the Polish Jewish community as anything but barely hanging on.
Gerardo, our trip leader who lived in Poland for 20 years and was an active member of the revitalization of Jewish life in Poland, told me a story about the March of the Living, which is an annual trip for Jewish teenagers from around the world. They spend a week in Poland visiting concentration camps, culminating in a march from Auschwitz I to Auschwitz-Birkenau carrying the flags of their countries. In Poland they see only death. Then they go to Israel for a week, where they only what is alive, positive, and good about Israel. There is definitely a political agenda here. Gerardo said his teenage son went on March of the Living a few years ago, and couldn't believe it when the bus passed right by the Yiddish Theater and the Museum of New Jewish Culture and no one said anything, so he stood up and started pointing them out and telling everyone how his father had been in the Yiddish Theater and how there was a thriving Jewish Culture in Poland. He was asked to sit down. The participants weren't allowed to leave the hotel and they didn't let Gerardo's son go out to have lunch with his brothers who lived in Poland until Gerardo intervened, and then only grudgingly. I am disgusted by this story and don't want to draw the same conclusions that this group is working so hard to promote by deception. But looking at the facts, I'm finding it hard to draw any other conclusions. Perhaps I need to lower my expectations, and instead of hoping to revive the incredibly rich culture that is mostly dead, appreciate the tiny shoots of life that exist, however small they may be.
Our guide at Terezin was Sylvie Wittmann, who is a leader in the Prague Jewish community and runs her own tour company specializing in Jewish history. Normally she sends out her minions to give tours, but she gave us three days of her own time to take us all over Prague and finally to to Terezin. She was very blunt and always prefaced her best insights with, "I don't want to be politically incorrect... ah, OK, I will be politically incorrect."
Terezin was known as the "model concentration camp." It was not as bad as the others, children lived there, and they had schools, music, theater, and art. The Red Cross came to visit in 1944, and the Nazis went to great effort to clean up the camp (mainly by shipping large numbers of inmates off to Auschwitz) and put on a show to convince the Red Cross that life was good here. It worked. They also made a propaganda film showing how great life was there. Most of the people in the film were shipped off to Auschwitz within a few weeks after the film was made. Terezin was of course upsetting but it was not that bad. Not much was left of what it originally looked like, so mostly what we saw was a museum, and not a particularly intense one. Writing this now, after visiting Auschwitz, I'm having trouble remembering it.
One thing that stood out at Terezin was a "secret synagogue," so secret that none of the survivors Sylvie has talked to remember it. It is covered with inscriptions in Hebrew, not typical religious ones, but religious Zionist slogans. Sylvie said this was considered very dangerous by the Nazis. They encouraged displays of religiosity because it encouraged people to put their faith in God and not fight back. This was exactly the kind of place that encouraged people to fight.
Our guide at Auschwitz was Tomasz Cebulski, and I think he must be the best Auschwitz guide on the planet, although he is overqualified for the job and I feel incredibly privileged that our little group gets to have three days of his time. He grew up in Oswiecim and wrote his PhD dissertation on "State Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau and the socio-political conditions of its functioning." He has dedicated his life to understanding this place and what it means for us today, and to communicating what he has learned. Although Tomasz said he tries to present what is here without an agenda, I don't believe this is possible. Everyone has an agenda. His agenda is to help us see that the Nazis were not monsters, but ordinary people, and that all human beings are capable of these atrocities, that such atrocities continue to this day, and our only hope is to confront this capacity within ourselves. He also has a agenda of educating us about the ways in which businesses profited from Auschwitz and were involved in every aspect of its functioning, and how the Nazis set up the concentration camps so that the prisoners did the most awful work, allowing themselves psychological distance from the atrocities. And he very gently reminded us that we are still doing both of these things.
The first shocking and unexpected thing about Auschwitz was that there is a mid-sized city right next to it, and people live out their lives there. On the way to the camp, we passed a shopping mall, a McDonalds, and the largest sign I've ever seen for KFC. There was also a billboard advertising "Peaceful Oswiecim," with pictures highlighting the many wonderful attractions of the town. There were houses lined up right next to the barbed wire fence of Auschwitz-Birkenau. None of us could imagine how anyone could live in such a place. We learned that the Nazis expelled anyone who lived within 40 miles of the camp, so this entire city has been populated since the war. Tomasz told us that no Jews live in Oswiecim. The last Jew there, a survivor who wanted to come back to his home town, died in 2000. Tomasz expects that one day Jews will live there again. The rest of us were skeptical and couldn't imagine that any Jew would ever live here again. There is a synagogue, but it is only used by visitors.
In Auschwitz I, I was mostly holding it together until we came to a display of children's clothes, shoes, and toys. It was a tiny display and you had to look over it to see what it was. As soon as I saw it, I broke down crying. I kept trying to go back to it and take it in, but I couldn't look at it. I could only glance at it out of the corner of my eye. I also had to rush quickly through the exhibit of children's drawings from Terezin, many of which were of things children shouldn't have to witness. I just couldn't be with them.
In Auschwitz-Birkenau, the most shocking thing was the sheer vastness of it all. At its peak there were 120,000 prisoners. Tomasz emphasized the orderliness of the process from the perspective of the Nazis, who were constantly refining the system into the well-oiled machine, and the randomness of it from the perspective of the prisoners, who by the time they understood it, they were dead. He also emphasized the amazing capacity of humans to adapt. While most prisoners at Auschwitz died within 2 months, there were a few who arrived in 1940 and were still alive when the camp was liberated in 1945.
Another shocking thing about both camps was how beautiful they were. Auschwitz is in the middle of a beautiful forest, surrounded by lovely trees. Auschitz I had spruce trees growing throughout the camp, birds chirping, and a peaceful woodsy feeling. Auschwitz-Birkenau was more sparse. There is grass now, but in the 40s it was only mud. But even there, through the barbed wire fence, all around is a lovely forest.
The gas chambers and crematoria were all blown up by the Nazis before the camp was liberated, in an ineffective attempt to hide the evidence, so all we saw at Auschwitz-Birkenau was rubble, but the rubble showed enough. Tomasz explained how Jewish prisoners handled all the dirty work. The only piece of the process that the Nazis did themselves was inserting the canisters in Zyklon B into the gas chambers. This was the one piece that couldn't be trusted to the Jewish prisoners. Once prisoners started working in this section of the camp, they were carefully tracked and marked for death, never allowed to interact with the rest of the prisoners again.
There were teenagers behaving horribly at Auschwitz-Birkenau, taking silly selfies, laughing, and chasing each other with insects on sticks. I found myself getting irritated with them, and with people in my group who I didn't think were behaving in an appropriately respectful way. I had to just keep telling myself that all these things were coping mechanisms, and everyone was doing the best they could in the face of something that is impossible to comprehend. In the end, I wasn't really upset with the teenagers, but upset with their guide, who hadn't done a good enough job of teaching them how to behave in a place like this.
Towards the end of the visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau, perhaps as my own kind of coping mechanism, I found myself consumed of thoughts of what I could do to take my experience of this place and turn it into something meaningful that would make a difference for the world. The numbers really impacted me, and since my work is in data visualization, I started imagining creating various visualizations of the numbers that would help make them more real to people. Tomasz talked about how when people first started talking about the Holocaust, as they do with every genocide, they focused on the numbers, but people couldn't connect with numbers alone, so then they started focusing on individual stories. So I started imagining interactive visualization of numbers where you could zoom in until you got to individuals and individual stories. I started thinking about how I could use my skills in data visualization to tell stories about all sorts of politically relevant issues, and started wishing I were independently wealthy so I could just do whatever matters instead of whatever the NSF would fund. I don't know whether these ideas will last or go anywhere past this trip, but these visits are definitely contributing to a growing feeling that ultimately I need to do something that matters more for the world than creating assessment resources for physics faculty.
After both days at Auschwitz, we got together as a group to process and talk about what was coming up for us. This was exactly what I wished I had after visiting the Holocaust museum, and I was grateful to have it. After both days, we were all completely emotionally exhausted. But it was good to be around other people who have been through the same thing.
There is so much more I could say, but I will stop here because I am too tired to say more.
Added on Wednesday:
A few more things I forgot to write about...
I've always had trouble wrapping my head around why, when the Red Cross came to visit Terezin, not a single person ran up to the Red Cross delegates and yelled, "This is all lies! It's all a show!" and explained what was really going on. Anyone who did this would have been punished brutally, but they were all going to be killed anyway, so why not? Of course the answer is that they didn't know they were all going to be killed anyway, and even if they did, they still might not have wanted to take the risk of a punishment worse than death. But it's still hard for me to wrap my head around. Yesterday we learned that at its peak, there were 120,000 prisoners in Auschwitz-Birkenau, and only 2700 SS officials. For someone on the outside, this raises the same question of why they didn't revolt. Even if the SS officials had guns and the prisoners didn't, if every prisoner in Auschwitz revolted, they could have overwhelmed them with sheer numbers. But of course the Nazis had set up a careful system to turn the prisoners against each other and keep each other in check. And then it hit me that this is the same as all sorts of power systems today, including our own government, where incredibly small numbers of elite keep incredibly large numbers of people from revolting. Revolt is hard, but it is often effective. Over the last few days, we've learned repeatedly about incidents in which the Nazis waited to see if the international community would object before committing the worst atrocities, and proceeded only after they heard no objections. When several Jews who were married to non-Jews were deported to concentration camps, their non-Jewish spouses stood outside the Nazi offices protesting, and after several days of protest, the Jewish spouses were released. After the Red Cross visit to Terezin, the Danish government, which was at that point occupied by Nazi Germany, insisted that their Danish citizens be sent home, and hundreds of Danish Jews were actually sent home from Terezin. It amazes me how often the Nazis responded when people protested, and how infrequently people protested.
I've noticed that within our small group of supposedly spiritual evolved people, all sorts of interpersonal issues have been coming up, and they were exacerbated in Auschwitz, probably because of the intensity of the place. It made me realize how much worse it must have been for people who were prisoners here. In addition to all the other horrible things they were experiencing, the intensity of the place must have triggered so much in their interactions with each other.
Another thing I learned on this trip that I hadn't realized was that no one talked about the Holocaust for 30 years after the war. The experience was so extreme that no one could understand what survivors were talking about. When they did talk, people thought they were crazy, so they quickly learned to shut up. This was especially true in Israel. Even though a third of the Israeli population after the war was Holocaust survivors, their experience as victims didn't fit with the popular Israeli narrative of heroism, and they were shamed for their experience. According to Tomasz, it was only in the late 70s and early 80s that people began to start talking about the experience of the Holocaust, asking questions of survivors, doing research, and writing books. By that time many survivors had been so thoroughly trained to shut up, that it was hard to get them to talk. There was a huge production of books that came out in the 80s. That was exactly the period when I, as a very young child, was reading every book I could find about the Holocaust, and Olivier said he was too. It had not occurred to either of us that this was a generational thing, and that our interest was part of a larger cultural phenomenon that was just beginning, and that these books hadn't existed until that moment.
After the SPU shooting, I wrote here about how impressed I was with the university's response, and how I realized that we know so much now about trauma education, and that the trauma counselors at SPU knew exactly how to support us in this situation and help us realizing that we weren't crazy and everything we were experiencing was normal. Without that support, I really would have thought I was crazy. I can't even imagine what it must have been like for Holocaust survivors, who after experiencing something far more traumatic, had none of this, and couldn't even talk about their experience.
This reminded me of the sermon in the service after the SPU shooting, about how everyone reads Psalm 23 after a tragedy, because it is comforting, but they don't remember that before Psalm 23 comes Psalm 22, which is all about despair. The conclusion was that we should not rush to comfort too quickly, but must first sit with the despair. I shared this with my group, and we read Psalm 22. It felt incredibly relevant to Auschwitz.
Finally, here is Olivier's blog post about the same few days, which captures a lot of what I wasn't able to say: http://www.betalef.org/2015/05/jewish-heritage-tour-of-czech-poland-day-fourfive-auschwitz-birkenau/
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