Hundreds, thousands, millions… numbers… just numbers are what is sometimes remembered when talking, writing, or reading about the extermination camps of Auschwitz y Birkenau. And the figures dance in a macabre dance that makes you dizzy as you listen to them, like a litany, while stepping with your own feet on the same ground where all those numbers used to crawl. And yes, you get dizzy, you feel nauseous and you even have to go outside to breathe fresh air. I lie. That air could not be fresh. And even saying “going outside to breathe” causes you a certain shame. You, thinking about breathing so as not to vomit, to avoid a “momentary” indisposition, while for them breathing was the daily, eternal struggle, not a clumsy and absurd “momentary” indisposition. A punch of irony in the face.
Get ready, it will only be the first of many that will hit you while you visit the camps with a guide, in this case Jewish (there is another blow for you), who explains in detail a story that no one should forget. Or should they? “Those who do not remember history are condemned to repeat it“, asserted George Santayana. Let everyone infer their own position.
Mine? Once you have stepped on Auschwitz, it is impossible for the massacres, the aberrations, the maximum cruelty in the form of gas chambers and the senselessness incapable of turning into ashes in its own crematories to fall dormant in the memory. Of course, it won’t matter at all that I don’t forget it, but it’s not a choice either, it simply stays there, lurking in a corner of your memory, specifically, hidden between rage and incomprehension.
Outside of the figures and data, from time to time, the people flash in my memory; because there were people there, no matter how hard the Nazis tried to reduce them to simple merchandise from which to profit, to skin, teeth, and hair with which to enrich themselves. Yes, they traded in the skin of those they exterminated… A silence is now most appropriate.
I prefer people over numbers. The quality of human beings was already stripped from them there to let them be mere figures now. It was inevitable for me to ignore the stories of many of the prisoners while walking among the bunks where they “badly slept” overcrowded, fighting for a gap of oxygen; because you are not reading it in a history book or seeing it through a documentary, but you are there, in person, in the same place where it happened; because my imagination is too overflowing and my sentimentalism is too weak to stay only in the data, in the great historical events, so it is inevitable to ask many questions even if I would have later preferred not to know the answers.
Between story and story, between the dead and survivors, between mud and dust, the level of indignation rises in an alarming way. And the punches of irony keep hitting hard when discovering, for example, how one of the most pestilential and humiliating places in the camp, the latrine barracks of Birkenau, made of wood and without foundations, became the only stronghold where one could enjoy freedom.The few times it was emptied and cleaned, the stench was so unbearable that the guards closed the doors to wait outside. For that reason, those latrines came to be called parlament among the prisoners, since only during those moments could they speak without any kind of censorship and found, literally inside the shit, a few moments of freedom. As I said: a punch of irony.
There are so many stories, details, scenes of the holocaust that you discover during the more than three hours that the guided visit to the two camps lasts that it is impossible to choose which to tell and which not to. If you decide to go, you will understand why. Going or not going to Auschwitz is certainly a very personal decision, so it is not about recommending it. I have only left some impressions, minimal since the flood of information you leave with is too overwhelming and broad to order, filter, and capture here; if someone manages to do it, I will certainly read it carefully. The dates, figures, and other data in this case, for me, were superfluous and can be found in many other sources. It is complicated to write about this place, and deciding how to do it and what to tell even more so. That is why I have delayed these lines so much since my trip and I know that if I wrote them again the focus and content would be very different but… this is what emerged while limiting details, feelings, and personal opinion very much.
Practical data:
The Auschwitz and Birkenau concentration camps are located about 70 km from Krakow, in the town of Oswiecim. The name of this Polish town translated into German is Auschwitz. You can easily get there on your own on one of the buses that depart frequently from Krakow. They stop in front of the Krakow Glowny train station, at 18 Bosacka Street. The round-trip ticket costs 28 zlotys, just under seven euros, and the journey takes approximately one hour and forty minutes. To go from one camp to another, there is a free bus that connects both sites.
If you are not part of an organized group, you can enter on your own, but for some time now individual visits have no longer been possible; instead, you must go with a guide, which is highly recommended anyway. On the website http://www.auschwitz.org.pl/ you can find more up-to-date and detailed information to organize your visit. At the moment, there is only one visit per day in Spanish at 12:30 in the morning. The entrance fee plus the guided tour costs 40 zlotys, just under 10 euros.
There are many books, documentaries, and movies about this place. But after the visit, I feel like watching the documentary film “The Portraitist”, by Irek Dobrowolski. Apparently, it tells the story of Wilhelm Brasse, the prisoner who survived the longest in Auschwitz. Born to an Austrian father and a Polish mother, he was imprisoned there for five years, when the average survival rate was only three months, but becoming the photographer for the Nazis made him “necessary” within hell. He died at age 95 a few months ago after having left an invaluable graphic legacy.
If you want to keep reading about this place, I recommend the #friendpost http://www.vero4travel.com/2012/09/visitar-auschwitz-birkenau-como-llegar-cuantovale.html from Vero4Travel
