A feeling of intense weight pressing one into the gravel-covered road necessitated an ordered and almost processional pace for entry into Auschwitz. Even gravity recognized the oppression of the place despite its neat exterior more closely resembling a scout camp than a death camp. The lie in the words overhe
ad as we crossed into Auschwitz screamed out still louder across decades with recognition of the spaces between the fences stretching out away from the gates--- a killing ground extended between guard houses marked by twin sets of barbed wire and an expanse of cleared ground. The line of demarcation between Freedom and masses of people judged to be less than human. A line between darkness and light incarnate.
ad as we crossed into Auschwitz screamed out still louder across decades with recognition of the spaces between the fences stretching out away from the gates--- a killing ground extended between guard houses marked by twin sets of barbed wire and an expanse of cleared ground. The line of demarcation between Freedom and masses of people judged to be less than human. A line between darkness and light incarnate.Within the structures inside those gates are memorials of every kind from extraordinary altars of candlelight and flowers offering appeasement for lost souls to the innumerable piles of the ordinary including items from shoes and eyeglasses to infant clothing. The mundane items that speak of the feet which were ever only intended to walk in through those gates, the eyes which were not intended to record the realities of the camps' interiors, and of ruthlessness and loss. Art, history, fiction, and memory have sought to somehow make sense of the lives both lived and lost within of Auschwitz-Birkenau's barbed embrace. The camp's remains house words, art, and photos documenting those who refused to give in to the horrors and those who could not help being swept away, and an endless line of those who would bear witness to the mute testimony walk the halls. This is not a place for forgetting.
4 comments:
I think I'd be too afraid to see that in person.
Oh my goodness. I'm feeling sick all over again, just reading these words and remembering the feelings of being there. It's something so horrible that words won't do it justice. But you've given a great glimpse of what it felt like to walk on that hallowed ground. The room full of shoes which walked in on living feet... The eyeglasses which rested on eyes that shouldn't have had to see what they saw... The infants who never outgrew their clothes... A whole society of people treated like trash. It's sickening. Thank you for representing it with the imagery and descriptive words that those lives never got the chance to share.
I couldn't help it, I cried for the emptiness evoked by the picture and the words and the recollections of scene after scene of the horrors of man's search for the "perfect" man/race. How like satan to deceive a single man and then a people to believe that our Creator miscreated... that man in his arrogance could make a better man when he had no part of creation in the first place. The horror of arrogance is deception and how powerfully you expressed the emptiness of soul/of heart/of conscience. The emotion which arises is anger and sorrow--equally linked like scissors that I would like to use to sever such evil from ever repeating. That, too, is pride. What is not reconciled through Christ will be called to account. Those who hung the lie across the entrance of this abomination are in a place more painful than we can comprehend because they placed their lives in the very hands of Evil.
I can't begin to say it any better than the others. Thanks for writing this, Holly, and reminding us of the atrocities that happened there. Hopefully, mankind will at least learn from the experience and not allow history to repeat itself. My heart is in my stomach.
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