70th Anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz

On January 27, 1945, the Russian army came upon Auschwitz and its various camps and subcamps. To commemorate this date, Charles Fishman offers these remarks and his poem "Eastern Europe after the War." 

After WWII was over and the camps were “liberated,” thousands of starved and brutalized survivors died; hundreds of thousands more were kept in holding pens that we’ve learned to refer to as DP camps because so many displaced inmates of the concentration and death camps had no place to go and were often too weak and sick to travel or to be permitted entry to the handful of countries that were inclined to offer them shelter.

From that darkest of times to our own unsettled and still broken one, many have asked where God was during the Holocaust. I’ve heard observant Jews and Christians say that God almost always answers our prayers, but that sometimes He says No. When I hear assertions like this one, I always want to ask why God’s answer was No! when so many believers prayed for their loved ones to live. As I see it, this is the key question that people of faith must ask their clergy and teachers. To this day, I’ve never received an answer that satisfied my mind or heart.

“Eastern Europe After the War” grew out of these thoughts and feelings.

Eastern Europe after the War

Wisps of memory     ragged dips in the grass

A few years earlier, millions died in sub-zero

temperature      Stripped to their underwear,

they were whipped    beaten with fists

and rifle butts    their infants ripped

from their arms      Their prayers to God

changed nothing      Shot in the neck,

they were kicked    into ditch after ditch    

Those still living clutched at prayer shawls  

or thrice-blessed amulets    but their words  

their tears    called down no power    

Their deaths did not alter the sky, which continues

to shelter their murderers      The earth

that churned for days afterward has yielded nothing  

but fragments      Years swept by, blurring

the landscape    though, on occasion, something

in humanity    twitched      A list of the names

of the missing    slipped from official fingers  

and drifted into history      In Eastern Europe,

not a stitch was mended      The gash

in the abandoned universe    could not be healed   

Tourist Season at Auschwitz by Mark Lewandowski

Polish-American novelist Leslie Pietrzyk has recently started a website called Redux to showcase classic pieces of creative writing that have so far not been published online.

The fifth installment features Mark Lewandowski's essay "Tourist Season at Auschwitz," originally published in The Gettysburg Review (1999).

I first read this essay about 3 years ago, and I thought then that I had never read anything better about what it feels like to visit Auschwitz. I had visited there in 1990 and written about the visit a number of times, about what it was like being a tourist there, but nothing I've written and nothing I've read by other writers compares to what Mark Lewandowski offers in this superb essay. Here is an excerpt. The entire essay along with a brief piece by Mark about how he came to write the essay is available at the website.

"Tourist Season at Auschwitz"

On the morning of the October day that England qualified for Italia ’90 (the World Cup soccer tournament), a small group of Englishmen were seen by some of the sports press at Auschwitz, laughing and posing as they took pictures of each other—doing the Nazi salute. Pete Davies, “All Played Out”

At Birkenau stands a mound unlike those dotting the countryside that Poles have built in remembrance of past generals and statesmen. You will not see picknickers lay out blankets on it or watch their children roll down the slopes. The Birkenau mound is a mass grave for Soviet soldiers killed by the Nazis. The bodies were packed so tightly together that they are still decomposing, and when it rains now, almost fifty years later, human grease rises to the surface and fans out through the grass in a brilliant rainbow of color.

Not far from the mound lies what looks like an ordinary pond. Bend over and peer into its depths and you might be surprised not to see a minnow or two, at least, in the water. Take a stick. Dip it into the water and movie it in circles. Soon, a whirlpool of gray ash will funnel to the surface. This pond is only one repository for the remains of the Jews.

A Polish actor told me that these were just a couple of the sights in the Auschwitz complex most tourists miss. I was with two American women I had met in a youth hostel in Kraków. This was the summer of 1990. The Berlin Wall had been down for only seven months. American tourists were still a novelty to most Poles. The actor, who spoke English fluently, spied us three on the rickety commuter train from Kraców to Oświęcim, site of Auschwitz and Birkenau. He was going to visit his mother, who was a librarian at the Auschwitz museum.

“By all means,” the actor said, “do not spend the entire afternoon in Auschwitz. After you have watched the movie and seen the major displays, go to Birkenau. The barracks still stand unmolested by museum directors. Wander the buildings and you will read messages written in coal by the inmates. You will find fragments of clothing, steel cans, rotted straw, heating stoves. Leave the barracks and follow the tracks to the gas chambers. They have not been reconstructed. They have been left the way they were found, a much more profound statement to the horrors of the Holocaust than the glitz you will find in Auschwitz. Why would the retreating soldiers bother to destroy the evidence if they were not aware of the incredible crimes they had committed against humanity? Do not believe that they felt justified or that Hitler brainwashed them. They knew their sin. You will not experience their guilt among the glassed-in cases of human hair and suitcases at Auschwitz. Only in Birkenau, the much larger of the camps, will you find what you are seeking.”

And what were we seeking? What do the hundreds of thousands who visist concentration camps every year hope to find amongst the barbed wire, the staggering statistics pasted to barracks walls, the bricks riddled with bullet holes and once saturated with blood?

________________________________

To read the entire essay, click here: Redux.