A haunting
The ghosts of the past never leave.
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I can’t sleep. I feel unsafe, even though I am completely so, tucked into a hotel room in Oświęcim, Poland.
The war in Israel is deeply upsetting to so many of us, but for some reason, it’s making me feel unsafe. I’m at Auschwitz, so it’s possible that part of the feeling is amplified by being so fundamentally reminded of my Jewishness with all the hateful rhetoric against Israelis right now. But that’s not entirely it. I’m feeling unsettled by the hatred on both sides, all sides. The utter certainty of self-righteousness. The violence of it all. The violence to come.
My usual tricks to distract myself — reading a book, trying to watch a movie — are impossible. My brain is moving too fast. All I can think is that I don’t want to go to Ukraine in two days. I want to go home.
I was inside the Nazi’s first gas chamber today. It was a hallway in the basement of one of the buildings at the concentration camp that held the prison cells. Somehow, it was possible at Auschwitz to be sentenced and punished in horrific ways that were even worse than regular life at the camp.
The hallway was narrow and dank, dry but somehow dank, with bars at each end. In September 1941, the Nazis had put 600 Soviet POWs and 250 Polish prisoners down there and threw in some Zyklon-B. Not everyone died the first night, so they gassed in more. Everyone was dead by the second night. It’s a cyanide-blue-tinted nightmare. A vision of the darkest circle of hell. The sense of being trapped was like nothing I’ve ever felt before. Even writing this is making me lightly rock back and forth.
So, despite being deeply physically and emotionally exhausted, I’m unable to sleep, or even rest.
Today the Israeli defense minister called the Palestinians “human animals.” The Nazis called the Jews vermin and less than human. The Russians have called the Ukrainians similar. The sense of history twisting in on itself is making me unable to finish this sentence. My mind is dissociating, knowing on some level that everything, everything is wrong right now.
One of our guides today called the Nazi camps “the end point of genocide.” The crime is many years in the making, with many components involved in its creation. For some reason though, we humans are simply unable to see this until it’s too late. We are inured to the extreme of the evil. It is a disgusting loop of humanity.
The villa of the former commandant of Auschwitz is large and nestled amid a sentry of green cypress trees not far from the camp’s first small crematorium, which remains intact because the Germans later used it as a bomb shelter. Now there is a gate that separates the house from the camp because people live there.
Before the war, the house belonged to a Polish family. After the war, it was returned to them. So people live there now, with a view of the gallows used to hang former commandant Rudolf Höss. There was so much to be repulsed by in our tour today, but learning this floored me. Who would choose to live in a place like this?
I was about to end this piece with the brief story of seeing this house. But then I looked it up.
I found this story about a woman named Anna Odi who grew up after the war next door to the villa, inside what used to be the camp’s administration building. Her father had been a prisoner in Auschwitz. He moved there after the war to protect the remains of the camp, to protect the memory of what happened there. As a child, Odi played in the garden with her neighbor who lived in the villa. Now Odi works for the Auschwitz memorial’s collections department, which contain drawings by prisoners and other artifacts.
I will ask our guides tomorrow if they know whether the people who now live in the villa are in any way involved with the memorial. But not knowing leaves the question open as to whether we choose to remember or forget, the question of whether we are willing to face ugliness over and over again. Are the people in the villa like Odi intrinsically linked to the complex, insistently remembering the past, or are they electing to forget, to live their lives in a beautiful house in a hideous place, choosing not to see the ghosts of the dead?
Unfortunately, the ghosts of the past never leave. Deciding not to look at them does not mean they don’t haunt the world.
Editor’s note: I’ve corrected a few things in the section on Zyklon-B. You can learn more about what happened here. I’ve also changed the spelling of Rudolf Höss.
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I heard a paranormal theory that goes like this: ghosts haunt places; poltergeists haunt people. There was once a movie about poltergeists, and what became of the people involved in the making of that movie makes for interesting reading. But, if paranormal theory has it right, the ghosts of which you speak do not roam the world, not, at least, in the paranormal sense. They roam the remains of the Auschwitz camps.
I was there, twice, in a guide capacity. The first time was with US high school students, and they took it grimly on the chin. The second time was with US adults, and already at the first room, with those "salvaged" prostheses, dentures, teeth, spectacles, suitcases, one young lady was so taken, I required to escort her back out of the place. Yes, kids can deal with more than the adults can.
I have a Ukrainian friend here in Belgium, and I have vowed that, once the shooting stops, I will go there and pay homage to the innocent who, for Ukraine, for Europe and for me, have paid with their lives for the self-determination of their leaders and, perhaps even, of themselves. Maybe after the war we will hear how many believe they were talked into it.
But I make enemies easily. It is never easier to make enemies than to abandon any hope of determining where right and wrong lie. To maintain the Holocaust was a horror, or never happened; to see Mr Zelenskiy as the saviour of Ukraine in its hour of greatest need, or the reason it was invaded in the first place; to see Israeli hostages as the victims of a political battle that has raged in Palestine since 1948, or as the last-ditch attempt by Hamas to wrench some form of justice out of having been excluded from their rightful - according to them - territory since the 7 day war.
No, no rights, and no wrongs. But mountains of victims. Mountains of spectacles. Mountains of suitcases. Mountains of false teeth and limb prostheses. Mountains of tears. Mountains of ignominy. Mountains of misery. All in the name of kings and countries, whatever your constitution says.
I went to Rwanda this summer and attended four genocide memorials in the country. One of the (many) things that struck me were the people who tend the memorials and provide tours are actual survivors of the terrifying genocide in '94 and each and every day they re-traumatize themselves (I asked, they seemed to be OK with this question) for the sake of educating anyone who comes there on genocide. One man was 17 and running barefoot back and forth between a church and the swamp each night to try to locate any survivors in the pile of bodies in the church. Now he is one of the people who clean the skulls and bones of people still being dug up and buried some 30 years later, and carefully takes each piece of still-bloody clothing out to the sunshine once a year to disinfect it and then places it back where it belongs in the pile. His wife still can't walk more than a block from the house without an anxiety breakdown and is trapped in that life.