by Sam Gossard
I gazed up at the entrance. It was nothing like I had imagined. The minimalist architecture made you think that you’re about to walk into some modern art exposition, hinting nothing at the haunting history of the place. Large groups of people filled the space in front of the visitor entrance. Our group of about twenty OCS college students was gathered near the bathrooms. I looked at the snaking line to buy tickets for entry and felt uneasy about my place here. I too was paying my dollar to gain access to a place that felt unworldly. I turned to my Jewish girlfriend, “Don’t you think it’s kind of fucked up how many tourists are here?”
“Yeah I guess, but we’re no different,” she responded.
I shrugged in passive agreement. She had always been a stable force, someone I could rely on. Even though we were still getting a tour just as someone would get a city tour, we were here to pay respect to the millions of victims. The bathroom break was almost over and we would join the visitors line soon, so we walked back over to the rest of the group. I was bored so I considered the vending machine options. I wasn’t hungry, but I would be later. I got the trail mix.
“Everyone put on your headphones and connect them to the audio device. This is how I will communicate with you throughout the three-hour tour.”
Our tour guide had a thick Polish accent, which gave her a sense of authenticity that I craved since I arrived at the entrance. The way she spoke was steady and calm. She was about sixty, with wrinkles on her face that were prominent by her eyes and on her forehead. Her short brown hair fell on her shoulders, with only a few grey strands peeking out.
We began our tour by walking through a hallway, constructed entirely of quartz, that would turn every fifty yards or so. Our tour guide told us to keep quiet and listen to the speakers on the ceiling. A woman’s voice began listing names as we continued down the hallway: “Erno Lichtwitz, Ernst Lichtwitz, Erwin Lichtwitz, Erwin Lichtwitz…” Throughout the five minutes that we were walking through the tunnel, we almost exclusively heard the last name Lichtwitz. How long could this voice go on listing names before it finally looped back to Lichtwitz? Weeks? Months? After a couple of minutes of walking, the quartz hallway sloped down as we walked on an incline. Soon we were outside on asphalt pavement.
As I looked to the left, I got my first glimpse of the gas chamber, signaled by the chimney. The living quarters, about fifty yards to the left and past a fence, were made of brick, with their roof shingles still perfectly in place. This was the first of two concentration camps we would tour at Auschwitz.
As we walked along the path, my thoughts naturally began to wander from our tour guide’s voice. I wondered how many of the people here were Polish people, and how many were foreigners. Still distracted by my thoughts, I came to the actual entrance of the camp. The entrance that the prisoners would come to, and most would never pass through it again unless they were headed to the gas chamber.
Arbeit Macht Frei . Work sets you free. Those were the famous words seen above the entrance. And everyone knew they were famous because plenty of people from several tour groups, stopped for a picture. I was drawn in and snapped a picture myself, even lagging behind our group a little bit so that fewer people were in the frame. Shame quickly washed over me as I noticed my distance from the group, my girlfriend looking back at me. I immediately justified the mindless act I just committed: The volume was too low on my headphones for me to pay attention. We were just learning filler information, I can stray from the group if I want to. Ugh stop rationalizing and just respect the place . I turned up my headphones to a blaring volume.
Soon after entering, we came to the first barrack that we would tour. It had been turned into a museum with pictures that showed what the prisoners had to live through: excrement-ridden living quarters, watered-down soup for lunch, and one set of unwashed clothes for each of them. Their shoes were taken and replaced with wooden clogs which had to be worn with no socks. The only way to survive in the camp was to steal or trade with other prisoners. I was honored by the survivors of this place, who tested the human limits of resilience. In one of the rooms, a group of middle school boys were crammed behind us waiting to look at one of the pictures. They were clearly involved in a side conversation that involved giggling. Absolutely inappropriate. I snapped my head around to telepathically scold them. They looked back at me and stopped talking more out of distraction than fear. Our tour guide would’ve been proud.
In another room, there was a collection of shoes and prosthetic legs. Many of the shoes were taken from children. I imagined the fear they would’ve felt as SS guards stole the shoes off their little feet. My throat started to tense and my eyes teared up. Next to the shoes, there were mounds of human hair, shaved from prisoners’ heads to make socks for Nazi soldiers. I felt my throat close up and a couple of tears streamed down my face. These people were reduced to animals–no, not even animals but vermin. I wished that in their last seconds, they had experienced dignified humanity, even though I knew they had not. As I stared awestruck at the mountain of hair, the somber voice of our tour guide entered my ears: “Please do not take pictures of the hair out of respect for the victims,” I thought back to when I stopped to take a picture of the gate: How could I have been so focused on taking a picture when the only way to understand this place is by comprehending what the prisoners had to go through? This thought sat like a pit in my stomach. It sat heavy.
Soon after we toured this barrack, we left the camp and bussed over to the second, much bigger camp. Stepping off the bus, the first thing I saw was a steel train track that stopped abruptly at the road pavement. The cold, silver rails stretched into the entrance of the wide brick building, which looked like a mouth, ready to engulf whatever train entered. Soon after we had entered the camp, a couple of high schoolers joined our group, free-riding the tour we paid for. Our group looked at each other, confused about what we should do. They weren’t overtly disrespectful, but they seemed sarcastically interested in what our guide was saying. Entrance into the camp required a tour guide, but there were certainly ways to sneak in without one. They were probably messing around and joining random tour groups for fun. My suspicion of their sarcasm was stronger than my certainty that they were interested. It was unclear if our tour guide thought they were a part of our group. I wanted her to notice and banish them, but that never happened, and they left our group.
As the high schoolers’ presence faded from my mind, I listened more intently to what our tour guide was saying. We were stopped near the outer fence of the camp. It was tall, with barbed wire on top, and it seemed to stretch on forever in both directions. “During the second world war, the Allied forces knew about the Nazi concentration camp, but little was done to inform the public until after the war. However, some governments found out about it during the war through photographs. Citizens from the nearby town of Oświęcim would be in contact with prisoners and sneak cameras in. Prisoners would then take pictures and give the camera back to the civilians. This was of course very dangerous for both the prisoners and the civilians brave enough to do this.”
As our tour guide continued to talk, I stood next to my girlfriend and looked through the holes in the fence into the forest. I was thinking about who I would’ve been as a civilian in the town of Oświęcim during World War Two. I desperately wanted to be the boy who snuck in the camera. Perhaps my girlfriend would’ve been the one on the other side of the fence, and I would help plan her escape. I would dig a hole under the fence to set her free. The image of my girlfriend through the holes in the fence turned into a much darker image of who I could’ve been. I was dressed as an SS guard, with my blond hair and blue eyes, looking over the prisoners at Auschwitz from the watchtower. I quickly snapped out of it. Glancing over at my girlfriend, I felt alone, like I had betrayed her beyond forgiveness. I couldn’t stand this guilt and reassured myself that it would’ve been impossible. I thought about the pride I felt as someone who was compassionate to humans and animals. After all, a huge part of my identity was my ethical veganism. Being an SS guard would’ve been on the opposite side of the morality spectrum. It would’ve made no sense.
We continued to walk along the fencing for a while until we break by the bathrooms. As I was sitting on the bench waiting, I realized how hungry I was. The trail mix in my pocket was appealing. I thought back to the skeleton-like figures we saw in the barracks of the last camp. The trail mix could wait.
We started walking to our last destination before leaving the camps. It was a tour of the most preserved barrack. We entered and saw several drawings from children. Adult prisoners requested materials for the drawings from SS guards. After explaining this, our tour guide told us to walk around the rest of the barracks. As I passed by the tightly crammed bunk beds, I noticed etchings in the wood bedframes from tourists. Countless insignificant names with year numbers pleading for attention. My breath became shallow, and I felt a burning in my chest that began creeping up my throat. How could these people be so naive? My mind flashed to the two high schoolers who free-rode our tour. Where had they been since they left the tour? I remember them leaving in the direction of this barrack. They could’ve etched their names in a desperate attempt to feel important, leaving marks where so many had theirs erased. They definitely could’ve been SS guards.
I hadn’t talked to our respected tour guide, but now was my chance to see how she felt about the worst of the tourists: “You know, there were a couple of kids earlier who weren’t a part of our group.”
She took a second to realize what I was talking about. “Oh I know,” she said calmly.
“Well isn’t it disturbing that random kids can just walk right into this place? They could damage what’s left of the buildings.”
She gave me a patronizing look. I must’ve seemed riled up. “Listen, I saw them walk over from another group. They probably just wanted to hear from another voice. And they were respectful and interested and didn’t stay the whole tour. They wanted to learn.”
I felt like an idiot: “Oh,” was all I could say. I realized that I had missed that crucial detail, of them coming from another group. She had the whole picture and I didn’t. Even with some uncertainty about their intentions, I had convinced myself that those boys were there to disrupt. My mind again flashed to the same dark vision, but this time it was more real. Maybe I actually could’ve been an SS guard, assuming my opinions of Jews as vermin was right and that their slaughter was justified. In that moment, I knew what Auschwitz meant to me. The feeling of moral superiority can be a dangerous thing. My veganness meant nothing here. There are things that we can’t see and our instantaneous assumptions will always obscure reality. This whole tour, I had fixated on respecting this place, but all this did was make me suspicious of others.
Our tour was over, and we started walking towards the entrance alongside the train track. The group was quiet, and there were no other tour groups around us. I felt the breeze against my face and the crisp air entered my lungs. I looked to my left at the destroyed barracks for one last glimpse, and I noticed a herd of deer running through the camp. How curious. Their powerless ignorance, knowing only what the grass and rubble felt like beneath their hooves, and where their next meal might come from. No assumptions.
