Birkenau Walk

I remember listening to the sound of the wind as we ambled through the camp. Most of our thoughts were too frightening to speak, so we shared an occasional affirmation of the view that lay before us. What lay beneath those words was something far more terrifying to confront lightly; the brutality of man.

My companion had been to Dachau, outside of Munich. That concentration camp had been razed to the ground, and all that remained was a memorial landscape. He conveyed this to me expressing the difference he felt while absorbing Auschwitz II, aka Birkenau, the Nazi death camp that we now tread upon. Here, the original buildings still stood, the train tracks still ran, and the fence still encased. Most of the wooden barracks were relatively dilapidated, though a few were modestly renovated by the Polish government so visitors could peek in to try and imagine the horror that they once contained.

As we walked toward the rear of the camp, huge chasms appeared in the ground that in the past held the bodies of those who were brought here to die. The end of the train tracks were marked by a memorial for the victims, and the flames of candles lit in their memory were the only sign that any people had recently passed this way. Beyond the memorial were the cremation ovens that lay in rubble, their backs broken when the Soviet army arrived in early 1945.

October was not the height of tourist season in Europe, especially SW Poland in 1992. The Berlin Wall was a memory, but still fresh was the West’s disdain for the East for all but old relatives seeking their families across the rusted Iron Curtain. We were alone this day, the only others around had left the physical world long ago. The wind was still here, making the same sound it had forty eight years earlier. Only now, we were there to hear the voices it carried through the years, and to try and listen to what they were saying to us.