When I went to Auschwitz I was only 21. I took the train from Budapest to Kraków and then from Kraków I took a bus – an excursion tour to Auschwitz. The tour began with a visit to the ovens at the original Auschwitz. There were two ovens and the ovens fit one body each. It was mind-boggling but the presentation was oddly sterile and genteel. Auschwitz looked surprisingly well-kempt and nicely organized. I would later read in the brilliant book THIS WAY FOR THE GAS LADIES AND GENTLEMAN by Tadeusz Borowski, a onetime capo at Auschwitz II, that Auschwitz I was the much envied sister camp, where the Germans
maintained the pretty Jewish girls whom they put to work as prostitutes.
At Auschwitz I, the buildings were constructed of brick and the camp had held up well over the forty years. But it is when I went to Auschwitz II, the “optional” part of the tour, a few miles away, that I saw the true enormity of the horror: The five crematoria, the vast train station within the camp where the extermination selections were made, the countless burned out wooden barracks where prisoners feigned sleep crammed together in their huddled, courageous, petrified masses. At Auschwitz II these structures were more like shoddy chicken coups than anything suited for human habitation.
There I entered one of the many gas chambers where the Nazis unthinkably dropped poison pellets over a people they had told they would be showering. Murdered by chemical weapon like bankable slaughter (gold teeth were removed and melted down) after toiling to starvation under a banner of Arbeit Macht Frei, these souls were the victims of 2000 years of anti-semitism, victims of the worst kind of cruelty the human heart has ever known.
I am but an aimless tourist, an unwilling heir to this crime, yet still today I am haunted from having ambled into the gas chamber that afternoon to look up at the little poison holes, the light streaming in.
The three videos of Holocaust survivors posted here are remarkable. As haunting as the gas chamber was for me, these stories are as inspiring. To understand the trajectories of Marcel, Rosa and Musia is to understand the strength of the human spirit. To witness the dignity inherent in the ascent from such a thoroughly compromised position is to gain access to a trajectory that represents a much broader spectrum of humanity than my generation of Canadians (all of us cocooned in our protective shells) has had the opportunity to experience.
And perhaps this is the most important lesson from these videos: Musia repeats here what Borowski immortalized in that book. That already in Auschwitz Kanada [sic.] had the reputation of being that warm, permeable cocoon which could provide a welcome to refugees of all kinds— giving them quarter, a space to grow. If we are to judge from the sentiments in these videos, we might indeed come to this same conclusion: that Canada may very well be the safest harbor in the maelstrom that is this Earth’s chaos.
