It is January 13, and I am standing very still. Steady but fragile wisps’ of snow dance mournfully around my feet; they must know that there’s no going back now and that they are to meet their resting place on what could easily be the greyest slab of concrete on earth…..
At a whopping minus 13 c, it is also one of the only times in my life where the hyperbolic cliché of ‘I’m freezing’ not only applies but is barely doing it justice.
I pull my jacket tighter and squeeze my damp lapels in an unconscious bid to keep out the cold – that deep, bone-wrenching cold – and glance blankly over this barren land that seems to stretch for miles. It looks sickly and impossibly colourless; the air itself thick with secrets.
My friend coughs weakly from somewhere behind me but no one else in the group has yet attempted to move or speak more than a few words – all ten of us understand that we must exercise our greatest respects for we are standing in the confines of a terrible part of history that automatically commands such reverence.
The sign on the plain brick wall confirms where we are – Birkenau – the second Nazi death camp born out of Auschwitz (or ‘Oswiecim’ to the locals). It is less famous here than Auschwitz itself and yet there is something much more deathly about this place; it’s like a silence, a space, an overwhelming flatness that you cannot speak of, only feel it weigh on your skin. We are in open – air but there is no bird song and signs of life seem uncomfortably far way. Even the trees appear too somber, too brittle to flex with the demanding press of the wind.
As the tour guide walks us over the gravel, pointing casually to the tiny, solid row upon row of shacks and workhouses, we see into the gaps, if only in our imaginations, and witness how many victims would have been squashed together here with just one tiny wooden bed for refuge. There was no running water and the stone floors, we are told, would have been alive with bugs, excrement and illness. We hear passing names of the few survivors that managed to last years of living in this grotesque abuse of humanity while others remain unnamed, lost. I wonder grimly if in this heavy air, I am breathing in some recycled, unfinished part of them, crying out, needing to be more than just a fleeting number. I can feel their childhood dreams folding; locked and screaming.
We arrive at the crumbling brickwork of a building whose vast iron chimneys once exhaled the frightened dust of human beings shipped here by train for ‘processing’ – for elimination. I kneel down and run my fingers over the icy metallic train tracks that delivered many an innocent woman, man and child to their final destination. No, this is no ordinary tour. This tour indirectly forces us all to question the complexity of the human condition in all its darkness and light.
Even with every fact that is offered to us by our part-polish tour guide, there is a sense among us that we will never really know this place, never fully understand how it came to be. More ominously, there is a darker sense that if we surrendered to it or offered our full minds to the deeds carried out here that it would somehow take us too and never let us leave.
Thankfully, the bus that has now arrived does let us leave. And as we pull away, comfort and gratitude entering my chest, I turn my attention to all of the defiant, hopeful spirits that somehow survived this place, those who found ways to stay alive, warm and brave no matter what hardships they faced and who lived to tell us the stories that have changed history.
You see – and I smile now with you – everything ultimately has its place and sometimes it is the darkest, dampest, deepest soils that produce the greatest flowers.
Flowers that otherwise would have remained hidden.
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