Memoir

Grey

The old bus departed for Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. My heart sped up as the coach did. My usually rational personality disappeared. The emotional took over the Perceptive soul, and strange feelings danced inside of me as before the beginning of any important event in my life. I was becoming anxious.

“Why do you want to go to Auschwitz?” My mother had asked me before I left home.

I calmed down. The sixty-minute ride allowed me to rest and reflect on the nightmare that over one-and-a-half million people who were tortured and murdered there lived. I reflected on all that I knew; what I’d read and what I’d watched. O violin de Auschwitz, Schindler’s List, La Vita é bella, documentaries, history books, photography exhibitions…and also on the lovely and innocent story of the escape of “Daagen” and “Sjoberg” that I made up when I was 12 and which had given me the first prize in the primary school literature contest.

My friends and I got off the bus. It was grey and foggy. A cool breeze went through the mist directly to our bones. The dull weather of that morning seemed to portray the human wickedness, which once ruled there.

“How could the sun shine here?” my friend Jairo joked.

Maybe he was right. Perhaps, the ambience had to be greying and faded, much like the level of the intelligence that ordered the genocide. It could be that it doesn’t deserve to be heated by the sun. Or should the sun as witness of what happened illuminate us? Either way, the deep shadow on the history, which Auschwitz represents, blocked the sun that morning.

In front of us was a little bookshop and café, selling Auschwitz ornaments and photographs. My five friends and I were told to wait there. Another 50 people waited with us.

“It smells like death…don’t you think?” my friends kept on kidding. They’d soon stop doing it.

Somebody came to organise the guided tour. Coloured stickers, tour groups, and an English-speaking guide. Done. Ready. The horror show could start. Lights off!

Arbeit macht frei. Work shall set you free. First slap in the face before entering the camp. This is written on the arch over the entrance gate. Going under the demagogical sentence, we walked into the Auschwitz I Konzentrationlager and a feeling of guilt hit me. Why should I feel responsible?

“Auschwitz I came to be the largest extermination camp for European Jews and other ethnic groups’ citizens who were forcibly resettled here,” said our guide. The camp looked good. Long streets perfectly lined up, separated by high-security barbed-wire fences. Unfortunately, it would have been impossible for “Daagen” and “Sjoberg” to escape from here. The design is excellent, very German. The efficient murder machine didn’t work by chance. The Endlösung, the final solution, needed a great plan.

“The Nazis were thorough. They planned everything,” the guide corroborated.

Nowadays, this area of the camp is used as a memorial museum. They have allocated several buildings for this purpose. Some rooms in these buildings just recreate the life of the German people who worked in the camp. Others gather traces of the horror.

It is commonly said that one death is a tragedy and a thousand are just a statistic. In Auschwitz, to the contrary, a thousand deaths make you shudder. When your eyes see behind glass a space of the size of your apartment filled up with human hair, another one with spectacles, one for suitcases, one for shoes, or another one with children’s shoes, and everything else that everyone had before getting to the camp, your soul has already burst into tears.

The silence in every room became the leitmotiv. You can only hear hushed murmurs, feel your heart beating and smell the sadness floating up in the air. My friends and I glanced at each other. The sight, again and again, told us everything. The exchange of information with my friends was constant and without end. Small movements of eyes, a raise of someone’s eyebrows, a sigh, and, ashamed of ourselves, we fixed our gaze again beyond the glass.

Every prisoner who arrived to the camp was stripped of his belongings. Then, they got their hair cut and if they had any gold or silver teeth these were removed too. Human hair was used to produce carpets. Gold and silver teeth fed the industry of the war. Their clothes, suitcases and shoes were also recycled. The rest found after the liberation by the Russians in January of 1945, is gathered in these rooms.

We headed out into another building. The guide stopped the group. She showed us one execution wall, which now had many flowers. It was in between two edifices. One of them was the experimental centre for doctors. Female prisoners, especially those who were pregnant, were used as lab rats. The expressions on everyone’s face hearing this were a mirror of their souls. The guide warned us, before getting into the other building, that it could be too dreadful. Even more than what we’d already seen? Yes, it was.

We stopped in front of one door. The guide opened it. Darkness and cement inside. This nine-square-metre room was a “bank”. I was just next to the door and unconsciously stepped back when I saw the darkness. Then, the guide spoke: “In this blind room up to ten people were locked for ten days. No food, no light, no water. On the tenth day, the Nazis opened it. Obviously, everyone was dead.” I wish I could find a word to describe the ineffable feeling that crawled up my spine. Does something more terrible exist?

Next door there is another torture room. Three little spaces of about one square-metre where two or three people had once huddled. “After one hour-and-a-half or two hours, they died of asphyxiation,” stated the guide. I realised that my friends weren’t kidding around anymore since the infamous entrance gates. An older woman in the group was crying her eyes out.

We left and headed to the scars of Auschwitz II, also known as Birkenau. On the way, we saw a crematorium oven, the only one still conserved exactly as it was. There were four of them. Innocents were carried and piled up before being burned. The gaskammer, gas chamber, had already provided the prisoners with the eternal shower. The flowers, also there, try to heal the injuries of history. My mind was still in shock, thinking of the blind room.

The four gas chambers were capable of killing two thousand people at a time. Now, there is only one, which was reconstructed for the memorial. The Nazis tried to destroy any kind of evidence when the Russian army got close. The gas chambers were the most obvious evidence of the massacre; they were dismantled before the Russians arrived. Auschwitz II finally became a graveyard of chimneys in the vast, flat camp where there were, in the sad days, over 300 barracks.

We crossed the railway, which crossed through the middle of the camp, and we arrived to the few barracks still preserved. They were about 30 metres long and 10 metres wide and three high. Triple bunk beds of wood filled the room. There, I thought about the films that I’d seen, everything was the same but without actors. The guide explained us the unhealthy and inhuman circumstances in the barracks where the region’s extreme climate offered winters below zero and summers over 40.

Next to them were the latrines. It consisted of a 40 metres long and one-metre wide “table” of cement with two holes of the size of a pizza every fifty centimetres. Below the holes was a depository. “The prisoners could use them twice per day, about 40 seconds every time,” said the guide.

Someone asked: “What if they were needed at other times during the day?”

The guide didn’t answer. She just closed her eyes and squeezed her lips. She breathed deeply.

“Look down through the holes. It was full of crap. The kids had to clean it from inside it. They sang songs to escape from reality,” said the guide. My restlessness was making me feel ill. I had goosebumps. My friend Antón went out of ‘the bathrooms.’ “This is too disgusting. I just can’t anymore,” said Antón.

We had some spare time to get to the little tower with a 360-degree view. The railway goes through below. This tower saw trains coming from all Europe. They were full of deceived innocent Gipsies, Poles and Jews. They had been promised a better life. By the time they got here, they were aware of what was going on. Some of them were already dead because of the long journey of one to two weeks, where they were given only water sprinkled through the slots of the wagons.

My friends took some pictures from the top of the tower. I leant my elbows on the windowsill and let my gaze get lost on the horizon where the railway disappeared.