Oscar Madison is still in Europe, and I just read the account of his visit to Auschwitz. He writes:
The tour quickly devolved into a museum tour distinguished only by its unusually horrific subject matter. You see, hear and read about, the detritus of the horror of the camps – the torture and executions, the huge piles of human hair and luggage – but it is conveyed in the manner of a museum: the tour guide’s lecture, captioned photographs and selections of real artifacts inside glass cases. And not a particularly well-presented museum at that: I’ve seen half a dozen museum exhibitions of the holocaust that moved me more. The Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. was a far more powerful experience.
I had exactly the same
reaction. The tour was so sanitized and so
remote. So unlike the moving experience I thought it would be. I cried at the Holocaust Museum and got frustrated at
Auschwitz ... until the gas chamber, which was genuine and heart-breaking. Oscar recounts his experience:
Auschwitz had one gas chamber – a prototype for the larger ones that would be installed in the later death camps – and it survived the war. The attached crematorium, where the bodies of those killed by the poison gas were incinerated, was destroyed by the Nazis in their coverup effort as they retreated from Poland; but the Museum has realistically restored it using original materials.
We lined up outside, and then filed into the gas chamber, as millions of people had done as the last act of their lives. In that moment, I felt all the layers of thought that protect me from shameful feelings – the evaluative, judgmental, humorous, cynical, angry layers of thought – stepped aside. There was nothing but to feel “I am here, now.”
I’ve not had that many moments of such unfiltered experience. This one took the shape of a single sob.
Having been separated from my tour group, I saw the gas chamber alone. Five minutes alone in the gas chamber. I tried to imagine what had happened there. The faces and bodies, the sounds and smells. I imagined the young guards shouting at the prisoners. Then I left the gas chamber and rejoined my family, who were waiting under the gate proclaiming Arbeit Macht Frei.
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1. Posted by Cathy on June 1, 2005 @ 7:42 | Permalink
One of the best Holocaust museums I've ever seen was at Dachau. In the main building, which has survived, there is a series of exhibits on the history of the period. Starting from about WWI, the exhibits slowly snake around the large room, showing how bit by bit over time things would change. The changes were so slow and incremental, and often each one seeming so reasonable in its own context, it was hard to realize, except once at the end, looking back across the room, just how mammoth the departure from reasonable things had come to be.
(The exhibits were all described in German, but there was a $30 book with the English translations. As a student traveler such an expenditure was quite a luxury, but it was definitely worth having. The book contains pictures of the exhibits along with its descriptions, so it's like having a portable version of the museum.)
Much is gone at Dachau. The barracks are mere foundational outlines, with just a few reconstructed. The creamatorium is still there, though, and still in operation as a building (not as a creamatorium, but the groundskeepers use the basement office).
But much of the impact of visiting Dachau comes just from being there, of being in a place where so many went in and never came out, while you yourself are able to pass in and out of those giant "arbeit macht frei" gates as freely as you want.
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