A Windswept Piece of Land

Readers of this blog - if such a class of people does exist - You're lucky! :-D

Here's my latest, a write-up on my trip to Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland. A statutory warning: some descriptions may be quite graphic, though in this case, I could not help that!

Read on...

A Windswept Piece of Land

The bus was jam-packed, filled with tourists of all imaginable colours, sizes and shapes, chattering away merrily as they rode the three kilometres to this remote piece of land in the very heart of Europe…a piece of land with innumerable stories to tell.

“Here we are, please form groups of six or seven and follow your tour guides. The tour will last approximately half an hour. This place is a historic heritage site. We request you to please therefore, observe the rules posted. Photography is not permitted inside the cabins. The bus will leave from here in 45 minutes, so, at 16:00 hrs. Make sure you are not…..”

By this time, all conversation had died down and though the well trained guide finished her speech, she had lost her audience – lost it to that white ice-covered, windy piece of land and its frost laden pine trees that shouted out, for anyone who would care to listen, one of the most compelling tales ever told.

We trooped in through the main gates, not at all prepared for what we would experience. I felt a shiver run down my spine and a lead ball settle in my stomach at the sight of those tracks. Three sets of rail tracks led straight from the entrance right through the fenced-off area to where the chambers had once stood – the biggest of World War II, the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the world’s largest concentration camp.

The pictures came unbidden playing like a movie reel inside the head, with the slightly hushed voice of the guide providing a cruelly graphic narrative as past atrocities came alive and the very sanctity of the human mind was called into question. I saw the prisoners being bundled out of the coal-carts, bewildered and confused, clutching their possessions as they looked around for their promised accommodation. Nothing would have met their eyes but the two bleak buildings, meant for them, built by their predecessors. More than half of the prisoners were then marched into a huge hall where they were asked to undress, leave their belongings and step into a shower room for “desanitisation.” Little did they know that those innocent looking shower heads were designed not for water, but for lethal gas that in the space of a few breaths took their very lives away - a punishment for having been born into a certain community.

The ground crunched under our shoes as we walked around, as we started realizing how lucky we were, simply, to be alive. The wind picked up, howling through the rows of low brick-cabins in the adjacent complex, leaving our hands and feet benumbed by the piercing cold, our minds benumbed by a horrific past relived. Cameras clicked away mechanically as the more sturdy of us filed the moment away in digital memories. We entered the huts where the prisoners were kept…and this part of the story was no better.

Each brick in these huts was put in place by the prisoners themselves. Each hut housing around 600 to 800, the prisoners found themselves sharing a single 2ft by 6ft bed with 6 others. A single row of toilets ran across the middle, serving all 800 and the walls and the floors, till today, bear the stains of innumerable struggles as a million incarcerated souls fought over basic needs that we now consider our birth-rights. Our tour guide then presented to us an irony so grim it was an effort to even imagine it;
The most coveted job in the camp was the cleaning of those choked, overflowing toilets. The soldiers in charge of picking prisoners for execution would reportedly not go anywhere near these people filthy as they were and thus this was the only job that offered a guarantee against execution. The full horror of the situation hit us like a sledgehammer and our stomachs churned at the thought of what the world had allowed to happen.

We walked out in a daze, by now too nauseated by what we had seen to absorb anything else. The guide, seasoned as she was, had a quaver in her voice as she pointed out the tower over the entrance from where soldiers would snipe at unsuspecting prisoners…for sport. What’s more, these prisoners were made to work in driving winds and snow and sub-zero temperatures wearing a single shirt and trousers, 12 hours a day, with nothing to go back to-no warm home, no family, no soft bed-nothing but a cold, dank hell-hole of a cabin.

As we left those fences behind, whatever else we may have felt in our lives, on this day we felt lucky. Lucky to be alive, lucky to be living in a time of relative peace and comfort, to be able to take for granted what some people had to fight with their lives for – lucky beyond measure. And whatever else we may come across in Life, whatever else we may forget…we must not and can not forget this.