Post #129: The Gates of Hell (Auschwitz-Birkenau)

16 Aug. 2024 (Krakow and environs)

     When the waters are at their darkest and most damning, it usually becomes most difficult to steer between Scylla and Charybdis. The more obvious of the two, cliché, stands as the writer’s greatest foe in general and threatens him more specifically with the dangers of treacly sentimentalities that ring hollow and trite. The other, Charybdis, undue reaching for originality and effect—for something new to say where all has been said already, and where perhaps silence would have been the wisest course in the first place—runs every risk of sounding pompous and presumptuous.

     The “gates of hell” in my title too might fall afoul of the first proviso if they had not, like those of heaven, completed the transition to fully established idiom so comparatively long ago. The association with a certain notorious gate dating to more recent, though blessedly receding, times also verges on cliché, as does the very name and image of the dark place I was going to visit today—which is one reason why I am glad that things did not work out quite as planned, if there can be any talk of planning in what was really a succession of spontaneous if perhaps not altogether unpredictable decisions.

     Naturally the question of whether I should make my way there, on my first trip to Krakow, at what feels like such a critical juncture in my life, had crossed my mind; but I was, all along, ambivalent at best about the idea, if not altogether averse to it. I certainly did not want to go; I much prefer to keep my pilgrimages cheerful and at least partially pleasurable, though admittedly I could also see, all along, the case for a kind of via negativa in such matters—going ahead with something dreaded precisely because one dreads it.

     Nor was I convinced of the necessity in my case. Surely I carry enough of the poison in my blood, I figured (see #105); so why up the ante? But the argument cuts both ways: since it appears that I must carry this burden whether I ever decide out the heart of darkness or not—indeed whatever I may do or leave undone—there’s also a case for taking the plunge, just in case it might allow me to leave some of the pollution behind. (The Greeks were wise to the world of blood-guilt: the miasma sticks and works its unholy magic, they believed, whether or not there is any personal responsibility in the strict sense. Oedipus did everything he possibly could to evade his prophesied doom. In the event, his very efforts undid him. When it was revealed just what he had done, altogether inadvertently and indeed directly contrary to what he had intended, he did not plead innocent; he plucked his own eyes out.)

     Be that as it may, my mind was on other things altogether this morning when I made my first forays into Krakow’s old town, wandering the streets, breathing in the atmosphere, saying some prayers in a place that seemed to invite them particularly (who knows how these kinds of magnetism really work), and using as my thread of Ariadne the many lovely cafés that lined my way. I migrated slowly south, via a Karma Coffee and a coffee Finca, and found myself strolling eventually down a lane that led to the old synagogue. I only saw it from the side, through a wrought-iron fence with a star of David worked into it, but it shook me up. (I strolled past the much grander synagogue in Budapest several times as well, but it did not have the same effect.) I suppose it was then that I realized I should probably go on my excursion, like it or not.

     I fortified myself with a layered honey-cake that I would recommend to any pilgrim hoping to get his spirits up for an encounter with dread forces, and I set off to the public bus, which departed, as it turned out, from the catacombs-level of a bus-basement that made a most suitable, if not very welcoming, entrance to the darkness on the other side of the journey—abandon hope all ye who enter here. Outside, meanwhile, and throughout the day, nothing but the brightest, cheeriest August weather imaginable, all blue skies, chirping birds, and a driver’s preferred radio channel that sounded every bit as reassuringly idiotic as its counterpart anywhere else in the world. Contrasts make the picture.

     Not to build up the story too much, what greeted me at Auschwitz was a well-fortified museum front with sharp modernist contours in stone and a huge line that gave no indication of moving at all—as if this was where the crown jewels were being kept, or the very keys to the kingdom. For my part I could see nothing to be guarded here, no sacred treasures, and nothing to be found that we don’t know from plenty of other exhibits in the inner sanctum of human evil. Here as at the Killing Fields of Cambodia, I sensed little but the lingering presence of the dead that need honoring and soothing, and the ever-beating wings of the furies that require pacifying wherever outrages are committed. Olympiads of suffering or league-tables of victimhood are not my thing. But the crowds might become unmanageable, you might say, if it were not for a firm framework. Possibly so, but one need not be an Eichmann to insist that lines are there for moving, not for being left to perish of sunstroke when many of them have traveled half-way around the globe to pay their respects. It is nefarious ends that spell guilt and shame, not the organizational talents one might bring to one’s crimes.

     An improvised-looking little sign stood forlorn by the side, with no obvious point of reference; other than that, there was no help to be seen. The sign said something cryptic about tickets for individuals “without educators” being available only after a certain time, still several hours off, but it was unintelligible to the uninitiated and looked utterly lost in space, addressing no one in particular, and pointing nowhere discernible. Not wishing to receive any further education on a subject about which I was confident of having done my homework to excess, I was rather keen on getting behind the mysteries of the sign, especially since there wasn’t any associated line, only the one to its side, seemingly endless and unbudging in the glaring heat.

     At this stage, surrounded by harsh surfaces, crowds that make me uneasy at the best of times, a mercilessly burning sun, and an immobile queue of the kind for which I lack the patience anywhere, let alone on the threshold of a death camp that I don’t much wish to enter, I would have been only too glad for any half-decent excuse to turn around and get right back on the bus I came with. But before I could take my leave in good conscience, I needed at least to make what inquiries I could—and as often happens in such cases, just then a helper appeared in a black t-shirt, looking and sounding like Count Dracula’s younger vegan brother. A long-winded fellow he was, no more to be rushed than anyone else on the scene, but evidently well-intentioned and at last informative.

     After a long and winding explanation, I was directed past the mystery sign and, as it turned out, to very nearly the head of an incomparably shorter queue for the deplorables without educators. Things at this near-pole-position were not moving expeditiously either, by any reasonable standard, but at least the little huddle of individuals ahead was such as to give the visitor hope of receiving a ticket before nightfall. At which point, as if things had not been smoothed out for me enough, a self-appointed facilitator, a grizzly gray-beard, appeared out of nowhere and sternly instructed me to move even further ahead, into a sub-line that brought me within hearing distance of the booth, where admissions were being authorized at the contemplative pace of one or two every five minutes or so, accompanied by ample, leisurely discussion. Who would be in a rush to get inside Auschwitz, seemed to be the motto, or else, here’s a small taste of how arbitrariness feels even in innocent doses.

     The not particularly friendly facilitator got even less so when he asked me where I was from and ran into my usual reticence. That question again, now haunting me at the very gates of Auschwitz! I rolled my eyes despairingly. He was not satisfied and took me for a cretin or a wretch. Nor was he a man to be put off so easily: “What is that supposed to mean?” he growled at me with thinly-veiled distaste. “Where do you think I might be from if I can only roll my eyes here?” I answered him back. He thought about it for a moment and had a moment of illumination. “Germany?” the sage surmised. I sighed. He was contented and mollified: “Then I understand,” he muttered and softened noticeably. Membership has its privileges.

     There was a catch to the whole thing, however, even after the Red Sea of the visiting masses had, without my contributing much of anything, parted before me as if to ensure by means mundane and miraculous that I would not be given any excuse for backing off from my dread business. Upon presenting my German passport (such, such were the joys) and the usual protracted discussion, I was issued my ticket—valid from 5 p.m. onward. It was only 3 p.m. In the meantime there was a shuttle bus that waiting ticket holders were encouraged to take to the near-by sister camp, Birkenau, which, though it does not have the same Spielberg-certified name recognition, turns out to be the part where most of the systematic extermination took place. But I was not thinking along those line, tracing the finer points of killing records; I’ve said my part about such score-keeping. I simply thought that since I was not willing to get myself baked into the modernist architecture while waiting for hours to enter the inner sanctum of a hellish cliché, I might as well go where the fates were directing me and take the coach.

     The set-up at Birkenau turned out to favor my purposes in that it was much more open and lightly guarded than the other complex, as well as neatly divided into two halves, separated by a pathway straight through the center that was not enclosed by the death-wires. Along this central axis the crumbling tracks also ran, for some eight hundred meters, between the infamous red-brick Death Gate on the one end and a memorial at the other. This was no time for reasoning things out; but at the intuitive level I was very glad to be given a chance not to enter into the enclosures, but to leave them to my left and right respectively—just a glance away in either direction, yet firmly on the other side of the wire. Where I was walking, beside the tracks, there was even a grassy shoulder alongside the gravel, where the greenery was growing wild, including some flowers. An intimate little trail had already been trod through the green so that there was no need to step on so much as a blade of grass. Nor was there much pedestrian traffic or group activity here, so that I could make my paces, a kind of informal walking meditation, entirely unmolested by the crowds, all the way to the memorial.

     What transpired at the end of my walk must remain shrouded from view. Suffice it to say that there was a row of slabs, each bearing a memorial inscription to the same effect, but translated into twenty-three languages. The logic according to which they were arranged was not very transparent, but there was a German one among them, included in an unobvious place along the line as if it were like any other (or perhaps lots were drawn except for the Hebrew at the very center). By the nature of what had brought me here, there could be no other spot for what it was I had to say in silence. I may not like to hear it much, but yes, there are times when blood, however tainted, is thicker than water, and this was one. So I did what I had to do, for as long as it took, then turned back, still with no intention to enter into the wired zone, but rather retracing my steps, for those same eight hundred meters—only a little further over, this time on the tracks themselves, or rather the rotting crossties, since the gravel between them was resonating before my mind’s eye with something more sinister that I did not wish to make closer contact with, thick as the darkness was to my left and right.

     They drew me in a little further with every ginger step I took, these wooden beams—some crumbling, others still surprisingly solid, but all of them as evidently long-dead as they were bearing, each in its different way, the marks of a unique personality. What was more, the wood had made room for grass and moss to grow, life asserting itself in the cracks where death had once held sway. One might expect my paces to be heavy ones, but my offering to the spirits of the dead, or the enraged furies, or whatever primeval powers rule such sites forevermore, already lay behind me, at my back, with no more need to turn around. If anything my steps were becoming lighter and more playful, perhaps even childlike, as I increased the distance. Not that the realities to my left and right had lost any of their salience, but perhaps some of the burden really was lifting. When the tracks came to an end, right before the erstwhile gates of death, they were simply old bricks, nothing to hold me or anyone back, but something to be left behind with a resolute step to the right and away from the horror—not in a spirit of denial, but of closure and renewal of life.

     The rest was a joyful and light-hearted, once again entirely unmolested walk past the great hubbub of the parking lots with their fleets of busses and armies of tour groups, the educational programming and all that goes with it, through a settlement of little houses in the modern village style such as one would expect to find anywhere else in the world. A few friendly locals, seemingly unperturbed by the ghosts haunting the land, gave me to understand, by turns, that there was a train station not far away—straight ahead, down the hill, then a left at the circular turn, followed by a right, and so on. It was a delightful peregrination through the fields and bushes of the lighter Polish countryside, lasting perhaps twenty minutes until I had indeed found my way to the benign tracks of the newly-built station, and to a plate of cabbage-and-potato pirogis with my first borscht in Poland, served in a coffee mug no less, and accompanies by that great local tradition—a glass bottle of Coca Cola.