So, we started with a nice breakfast at the hotel, then drove to Auschwitz. We joined the English-speaking tour and were told that it would take about four hours. The tour starts at "Auschwitz I" which started as a pure "concentration" camp, meaning a place to warehouse all the "undesirable" people, but not necessarily a death camp. This is where they started doing medical experiments and did their first testing to see how much cyanide it took to kill a bunch of people huddled together in one building. We toured several of the original buildings, which are now set up as museums of various aspects of the camp, such as daily life, the experiments, the prison building, the SS quarters, and the first gas chamber. One of the buildings showcases all of the luggage people brought with them, not knowing they would be forced to immediately turn it over to the SS guards upon arrival. Later in the camp history, when people were simply immediately killed upon arrival, things like their shoes were kept. After being gassed, the women's hair was shaved and sold to shops where it was weaved into cloth. One room was simply a huge pile of hair from 30,000 women who were murdered.
The second half of the tour was to the nearby death-camp Birkenau. We saw the temporary living conditions, the remains of the crematoria, and the SS watchtower.
It's hard for me to put my experience and impression into words. It was chilling, sobering, depressing, and simply sad. I found myself about to cry on several occasions, and nauseated on many more. I looked at the faces of victims, captured in photos taken by the SS guards right before they were sent to the "showers." One of my distant relatives was an Austrian Jewish man. Are some of my relatives in those photos? I looked at the chart showing the various ways they classified and marked the prisoners... Jews, criminals, homosexuals.
Because I was in Rwanda only a few weeks ago, I couldn't help but compare the European genocide to the Rwandan genocide. How are they similar, and how are they different? Is one "worse" than the other? Here are some thoughts that flitted through my mind:
Similarities:
1. Thousands and thousands of people were murdered every day.
2. People were chosen for death based on their birth conditions, mostly, something over which they had no control.
3. The types of people chosen for death were classes of people who at one time, in some way, were "privileged" (at least, most of them). Thus, at least part of the genocide was due to simple envy and frustration, which turned to hatred.
Differences:
1. In Europe, people killed strangers in factory-like conditions, making it an industrial machine. In Rwanda, neighbors and friends killed each other close-up, face to face.
2. "Only" one million people were killed in Rwanda. Over eight million were killed in Europe. However, the killing in Rwanda happened much more quickly and efficiently.
3. In Europe, priests and other religious leaders were marked for death due to their higher level of education and the fear that their advanced thinking in terms of ethics would cause them to protest the genocide. In Rwanda, many priests and other religious leaders contributed and helped the genocide.
Similarity:
1. Both made my academic "psychology sense" come out, as I tried to analyze the who, what, when, where, and why of what happened. Only by understanding these questions can we try to prevent such atrocities in the future.
2. Both made me want to cry.
In the afternoon, we drove to Prague. I felt nauseated, but couldn't tell if it was because I hadn't eaten, because the Polish roads were hilly and curvy, or because of what my mind couldn't repress. I eventually took a pill and fell asleep.
We arrived in Prague about five hours later. We settled into our room, took the local tram to a non-tourist part of town, and had dinner. We plan to get up relatively early tomorrow and tour this beautifully preserved city.
For now, I want to sleep. I hope that I don't dream. Photos below are from this morning.
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