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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