Sometimes you receive notes from friends and they are so tangibly touching that you need to share them with as many people as you can. So today's post is just that - From James Mills - awesome person and world traveler:
August 10, 2010
Two days ago I visited Auschwitz. Nothing you see or do in life prepares you for something so horribly awesome as this place. There are three main camps in Auschwitz, but the one that stands out the most is Auschwitz 2, Birkenau. Maybe it is because of how many times we have seen it in movies, or the replication of it in movies, as in Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. I have been unable to get the image out of my head since. I keep asking myself, Why and how could this happen? And I know that there is no answer to that question, but I still feel compelled to ask.
The train tracks leading through the front gates are surreal. Standing in them, the 65 years between today and the liberation of Auschwitz simply vanished and I could see the men, women and children disembarking and being herded by the madmen and women at the camp into their fates. 75% of the up to 20,000 people who arrived in Auschwitz every day were sent immediately to the gas chambers, mostly the elderly and children, those deemed not fit for hard work.
When you walk through the gates of Birkenau, you see the barracks that have survived and upon entering a barrack, you see the racks that served as the sleeping areas for the prisoners and slaves of the Third Reich. They were built to accommodate 40 people but most of them had 70 to 80 people. Each barrack has two brick fireplaces inside, one at each end of the building. Many of the buildings at Auschwitz have long since disappeared but the fireplaces still stand so you can see how many barracks there were. The size of the camp itself is startling. Birkenau was the home of the gas chambers and the crematoriums. The ashes from the crematorium were used as a substitute for gravel to line the pathways of the camp.
There were about 400 successful escapes from Auschwitz. When someone escaped, the SS would randomly select people from the barracks where the escapee lived and murder them. Their favorite form of execution was starvation; they would pack four prisoners into a tiny room where they could only stand facing each other and leave them there crowded together until they died.
After Birkenau, I went to Auschwitz I. It served as the administration center for the death camps. I thought about what that must have been like, the people who worked there, got up every morning, had their breakfast, kissed their husbands or wives goodbye and went to the office to shuffle the paper of the lives they had transformed into numbers on a list. They probably went out to lunch with friends and co-workers and at the end of the day went home to their families, tucked their children in at night and maybe even read them bed-time stories. It is these people that challenge any hope I have for humanity the most. It is these people that make me understand how evil can appear so innocuous, after all, they were just office workers shuffling paper. How they went about their daily lives rationalizing what they did every day simply astounds me. They were no less murderers than the people who walked their victims into gas chambers, in fact, they were worse. They were the real criminals of Auschwitz. It is the people who close their eyes to what is going on around them that I have the most contempt for.
I went back to Birkenau one last time before leaving the camps to pay my respects to the 1,000,000 Jews and the 100,000 other people, Poles, Gypsies and political prisoners, who died at Auschwitz, and the countless others who suffered and yet somehow survived. And I felt a deep melancholy for the whole human race. I thought, Could this happen again? And I knew instantly that it could. Even in the United States the hatred people feel for other races astounds me. I have no doubt that if the Arizona legislature passed a law that said all Mexicans were to be rounded up and placed in concentration camps, there would be thousands of volunteers, mostly people who considers themselves the “real Americans” ready, wiling and able to do the work of their country or of their God, or both.
This journey of mine has been amazing, but in any journey, you cannot avoid the horrors that people commit against each other. Such is our world, the beautiful and the ugly exist side by side and we all make choices. Clearly nature does not take sides, it just lets events unfold. I do not believe in a separate conscious God, for me, only people can make this world better. I hope we do.
James Mills
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