The Highway to Auschwitz

When going on a tour of Auschwitz you will feel guilty complaining about anything.

Fortunately, I was able to overcome this challenge on more than one occasion. The trick was to view my whining as a beautiful and profound reminder that the Jewish spirit is alive and well after the Holocaust.

On the morning of the tour, I woke up on the aqua-blue, collapsible sofa I had been sleeping on in the apartment my wife Cate and I were Airbnb-ing in Krakow. Cate was upstairs in the loft, as our jet lag schedules were not in sync, and when she would finally fall asleep is right when I would toss and turn, and vice versa.

Above me was a window encasing a couple of scraggly, gray branches in the colorless Krakow neighborhood we had been clomping around in for the last six days. Having been in this bleak town that was the setting for Schindler’s List all week, I am now convinced that Spielberg was actually shooting the movie in color and that’s just what showed up on screen.

I walked outside into the cold, mercilessly crisp, morning air.

The driver for our tour, a short, stocky bearded man who looked like me (this describes 80 percent of the men in Krakow) was already waiting outside.

“Hello, I am Igor,” he said in a Polish accent as thick as my neck.

“Raanan.”

“You are ready to go to Auschwitz?”

Eighty-five years ago this would be a terrifying question for someone like me to hear, but now it’s been mollified into something mundane, practical.

Where my ancestors perished was for me now a ‘tourist trap’.

Life moves on.

“Yeah, my wife will be down in a minute.”

“Very good. I do not know if you got message but I provide lunch boxes if you want to order them.”

“Sure, that works.”

“Any dietary restrikshions?”

I closed my eyes and imagined the S.S. Guards inquiring of the inmates if there were any dietary restrictions when they arrived at Auschwitz. “Well, actually, I keep kosher, but you probably knew that already.”

A couple minutes later my wife and I were sliding into Igor’s faded black, bird-shit-specked van on the curb. A sleepy, octogenarian couple had been stuffed into the seats behind us.

The van rattled violently as its tires rolled over the medieval, cobblestone streets of Krakow’s Old Quarter, the heads of the now sleeping couple behind us bobbing against the car’s roof. Five minute in, Igor stopped the car.

“Guyz, I will be back one minute.”

Fifteen minutes later he returned with a middle-aged American couple who he sat up front with him. The man was wearing a bright blue Florida Gators T-shirt which I found to be in bad taste. Obviously you don’t have to be in striped pajamas when touring Auschwitz but it definitely feels like a ‘solid color shirts only’ affair.

A couple more blocks of driving and then Igor stopped again.

“Guyz. I will be back one minute.”

“How many more people are coming?” Cate asked nervously.

He returned with a stocky, acne-scarred Asian girl who, after Igor scanned the van, chose to sit half on Cate’s lap.

Jesus Christ we were taking a clown car to Auschwitz.

I began to legitimately worry that when purchasing the tickets online I had accidentally selected the ‘immersive experience’ option.

As Igor continued driving, he launched into his spiel. You could tell right away there wasn’t much for him to go over until he passed us along to the tour guide, so to feel more essential he padded what he said with a lot of superfluous information.

“Okay guys when you go inside there is security check point at camp of Auschwitz. So they just got couple of gates with metal detectors. It is made of course to make sure that everyone is safe.”

We all nodded blankly.

“Security check point is what I am sure you’re used to because it is same one you meet at airport.”

We nodded but our confirmation that we knew what security check points were didn’t stop him from continuing to describe them in excruciating detail. This reminded me of when I tell my wife, in the middle of her telling a story, that I have in fact heard her tell this story many times, and she somehow interprets this as a cue to keep going.

“So you will have plastic box to put your things in…phone…wallet…keys. The Plastic box will go through metal detector…then you will go through metal detector…then you will take stuff out of plastic box and put back in pocket. Now, when it comes to photographs…”

As I was bracing myself for him to explain the entire chemical process involved in photography, Igor abruptly swerved on to the highway.

The highway to Auschwitz.

“Actually you can take as many of them as you would like to, ” Igor continued. “The only thing is to just not to use the flash lamp in doors please…So I would say that’s all about the most important rules of museum of Auschwitz. Also your guide will be telling you lot of like real life stories from the camp of Auschwitz or even about sick medical experiment. So definitely will be very knowledgeable tour.”

I glanced out the window as rows of denuded oak trees flanking the highway hurtled by. These were the very woods that the few inmates of Auschwitz who managed to escape had hid in before being caught or in the very rare occurrence surviving.

The song “All Star” began blaring from Igor’s speakers.

And just like that, we were now being driven to Auschwitz, listening to Smash Mouth.

“Hey now you’re an all star…get your game on…Hey!”

We drove by a shiny-white, clapboard, church. What good are churches I thought, if they couldn’t stop this?

“Hey now you’re a Rock Star…Get the show on, get paid!”

We pass a restaurant pizzeria, a Dino grocery, power lines, frozen grass, a burger and kurzak grill, misty fields, a bridge over a creek whose surface mirrors the sky, subdivisions, more power lines, more frozen grass, a faded lime apartment complex, an ad for Burger King (2 burgers for 5 zlotys), a sign for Hotel Dabrowski, a sun slowly ascending from clouds, more fields, another church, another bridge.

And then, all of a sudden, we’re here, in the parking lot of Auschwitz.

“All that glitters is gold…”

Our tour guide is a petite, mousy Polish woman named Anna. What’s interesting about Anna is that she has this incongruously sing-songy voice that would be much better suited for a tour of, say, Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. She describes everything- no matter how horrible, and it’s all horrible- like she’s describing a beautiful, magical experience.

“And this is Block 11…” she would say with a dreamy lilt at the end of every word. “Where they would torture prisoners.”

In her defense, I’m sure if she was speaking Polish, she would have been able to modulate a somber tone, but with English it got away from her, without her realizing it. And now as a result, it sounds like we’re getting a tour of Auschwitz tailored for Neo-Nazis.

“This is of course the famous Work Sets You Free Gate,” she announces excitedly as if she’s pointing out where they filmed The Godfather on a tour of the Paramount lot.

We walk under the famous sign- it’s wavy metallic borders gave it an almost Modern Art feel- and into Auschwitz 1, which is made up of rows and rows of identical faded red brick buildings surrounded by barbed wire.

We walk through Block 4 and 5, where we see the hill of hair, the hill of shoes, the hill of suitcases. When we go back outside it’s even colder. Cate is shivering as if she’s about to die in a Jack London short story. I’m not as cold as I brought many layers- a hoodie, 40 extra pounds of fat, and a winter coat. You can hear a chorus of teeth chattering from the other people on tour.

“Okay next,” Anna says sweetly, “we are going to go inside the only standing crematorium in Auschwitz 1.”

“Thank God,” the American with the Florida Gators shirt says to me way too loudly. “It’s fucking freezing out here.”

After Auschwitz 1, Igor drives us the 3.5 kilometers to Birkenau, the death camp.

Birkenau is essentially the remnants untouched; it’s lack of museum quality deprives it of any barrier or distance. You feel like you are there.

We gather at the railway station, where Jews were either deemed fit or unfit for forced labor. If unfit, they were told to wait in line outside a nearby showering facility, and in only a matter of hours the grass they were standing on would be sprinkled with their ashes.

We walk up to the remnants of Crematorium 111, blown up by Nazis at the end of the war to hide the evidence of mass murder before the Russians arrived.

Before me are blackened steps leading down to the burnt-out remains of the underground Crematorium, now just slabs of concrete and steel rods jutting out of the Earth.

It looks like a drained swimming pool full of gray corpses.

So much murder in such a small place.

That was what seemed most perverse in that moment. The fact that a million people were murdered in such a small area. How could such a tiny plot of land be where the greatest crime scene in the Universe took place? It should be fields, endless, endless fields, where massacres happen. Not just a small corner of the Earth like this whose perimeter you can walk around in less than a minute.

Being in Birkenau chips away every so slightly at the illusion that allows us to function as a civilization after the Holocaust:

That it was a long time ago.

Seeing the wooden barracks, the exploded bricks, the watch tower, touching the same stones touched by inmates, standing on the same hard, frozen ground where they were lead to their death, causes history to awaken briefly from it’s deep slumber. The Black and white of Schindler’s List allows you to detach yourself from it, to imagine that it happened in some ancient time, but it didn’t. Snow White and Gone with the Wind we're already classics. Jack Nicholson had already been born. The Holocaust is not from a different time, but our time.

The Holocaust was in color.

And the people who were erased during it were not different from us. That’s the real illusion! Not only that it wasn’t a long time ago but also that it happened to people different than us. The barriers and motes we build to separate us from the dead is one of life’s endless preoccupations. They’re not us, we say. Not the victims of the Holocaust or Rwanda or Hiroshima or Gaza or Darfur. They don’t mind the same way we would mind. Their dreams aren’t ours. We pity them, sure, but more as martyrs than reflections in a mirror.

That our bodies and minds are identical to those as the damned is a burden too great to bare for long.

As we were leaving the rubble of the exploded crematoriums, and walking past a long line of barracks, suddenly I had felt a feeling I had not prepared having at any point during this trip.

It crept up on me without warning.

I had to fart.

It felt deeply offensive to have this need here but my colon has no sense of reverence or sanctity. Like the flowers blooming in Rudolf Hoff’s garden a hundred meters away from the people asphyxiating in the gas chambers, my colon was indifferent to the sobriety of mass murder.

“Babe, I have to fart.”

“Well move away from everyone.”

“Obviously.”

I walk on my own down a field. As cold as it is, it’s a beautiful day. Around me the afternoon sun cobwebs patches of frozen grass in golden threads of light.

I start to fart.

They came out like little pops.

Fhfhf,….fhffh….ffhfh….fff….

We desperately try to hold the universe in mourning, but Smash Mouth and sing-songy voices and ill-timed farts get in the way.

I walk back to join the tour and soon we were all in the bookstore outside the barbed wire fence. It’s essentially the Museum’s gift shop but you can’t call it that. It would be in bad taste for Auschwitz to have a gift shop so they call it a bookstore.

I flip through a book of poems written by children in different concentration camps before they were gassed. I thought this might be a good addition to my shelf of Holocaust books in my apartment. As I am line waiting to purchase it, I read one of the poems:

“I want to fly but where, how high?

If in barbed wire, things can bloom

Why can’t I? I will not die!”

Did the forlorn child who scribbled this poem on a piece of paper in 1942 ever conceive that it would one day be sold in a gift shop right outside the fenced in perimeter? I look through the window back into the camp and imagine the emaciated child author of that poem staring back at me. In his shriveled hand is the piece of paper where he is writing the poem that more than half a century later has been published in this book I am now waiting in line to purchase.

Briefly untrapped by time his tortured eyes stare bitterly into mine.

If I look too long into his eyes I will drown.

“Next.”

The voice mercifully dissolves the child into thin air.

And now it’s my turn at the counter, and I have to take out my wallet and decide which of my credit cards I want to buy the book with. I end up going with my American Express card, as I vaguely recall getting 4 to 1 points for this type of purchase, though I’m not sure if it works internationally. Then I ask where the bathroom is and she points to one across the street. When I walk over I see it costs 2 Zlotys to use the bathroom. I slip two coins into the slot and it spits one back out. “Goddamnit,” I mutter under my breath. I slip the coin in again and this time the door unlocks with a click and I step inside.

As we’re leaving the camp I remember these famous words I once saw inscribed on the wall of the Holocaust memorial museum in St. Petersburg, Florida: “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric…”

Barbaric as it may be, there has been so much poetry. Poetry and art and music and movies and comedy and commerce and progress and democracies and dictators and global harmony and genocides.

Unhalted in equal measure by the beauty and horror of man, the river of life hurtles on.

A cause for celebration or despair?

“Hey Now You’re A Rockstar!”