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.
A witness to history
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 and 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.
Face to face with signs of horror
The hostel was brutal. The 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.
