Krakow/Auschwitz

I figure I'll start with Krakow and then move on to Auschwitz. Like I was writing before, Krakow's actually a really nice city. It pretty much escaped WWII unscathed (comparatively at least, and only in the sense of buildings -- not people), even though 60,000 Jews lived here before the war. Only 5 percent of the Jews survived, and now Kazimierz, the old Jewish district, is essentially a shell of what it used to be. The town has preserved the history, but there are almost no Jews there. So many synagogues, but I couldn't find any that were open for worship.

Way outside the center is Schindler's factory. It's in this dingy corner of town across the river, surrounded by train tracks and run-down buildings. Schindler, of course, had structured everything so that it was cheap. He got the factory in a police auction after the previous owner -- a Jew -- had had it taken from him; he employed Jews because they were cheaper labor. He bribed the SS not to fuck with his workers, not because he cared about them, but because the snow-shoveling detail Jews were forced into was making them late to work, and he was losing money. No one's sure when Schindler -- initially this selfish, greedy, womanizing ass who wanted to become a racecar driver -- found his conscience and started seeing the Jews as people instead of his slaves.

Schindler was a complete failure at everything he tried after the war, and still not a very good person in the end. He moved to Argentina, I think it was, and tried to start essentially a rat farm to make fur coats out of this animal that sort of a cross between a rat and a beaver. That failed, everything else failed, and he eventually ditched his wife and his girlfiend and left the country. He tried and failed at businesses for the rest of his life, and he was broke for the rest of his life because of drinking, gambling and women. No one really knew anything about him until an Australian writer was shopping in L.A. somewhere, and the salesman at the store started talking about how he'd survived the Holocaust because of Schindler. He was one of 1,098 Jews who Schindler saved. Anyway that's where the book came from.

The factory itself is nothing -- you can walk up some stairs and watch a seven-minute slideshow that isn't particularly informative, and then walk up another flight to Schindler's old office, and look out the window at the outside of the factory. I got lucky because an English-speaking city tour was coming through right after I did, and the guy let me listen in.

Before the Schindler factory, I was at the Jewish Museum, which talked a lot about how so many Polish towns have forgotten the Jews who lived there before the Holocaust. One synagogue near Krakow turned an old synagogue into a furniture warehouse. It also talked about how we hear so much about camps like Auschwitz and Birkenau that we forget about others that executed thousands of people, too. One camp, Belzec, murdered 600,000 Jews. 10 survived.

Before the Soviets came in, the SS demolished the entire camp and planted trees over it to cover their tracks. All that's left is a sign indicating what it used to be.

And on that note:

Auschwitz/Birkenau
The camps are two completely different experiences two miles from each other. Both were preserved as they were upon liberation -- for Auschwitz that means a maze of bunks and barbedwire, with the gas chamber and incinerators still intact. For Birkenau that means very old bunks with leaky roofs, the same maze of barbedwire, and six piles of ruins. The ruins used to be gas chambers. Five were burnt down by the SS right before the liberation, and one was burnt down in October 1944, during the only prisoner revolt in Auschwitz. 450 Jews whose job it had been to move the dead bodies from the gas chamber to the incinerators finally decided they'd had enough.

The bunks in Birkenau made Auschwitz look like the Ritz. Hundreds of people would pack into stables that had been built for 52 horses. The only heating system came through a single chimney, and it often wasn't working, so the inside was as cold as it was outside. The roofs leaked so rain and snow poured down onto the people on the top bunks. The people on the bottom bunk didn't have it much better, because they were sleeping each night on concrete instead of wood. The best spot was the middle bunk, because all they had to put up with was overcrowding and lice.

Seeing everything -- the well-documented artifacts at Auschwitz and the ruins at Birkenau -- made me think about the whole Holocaust denial movement. I wonder if the people who deny the Holocaust happened have been there. I wonder if they've seen the six tons of human hair that would have been sold to companies for making mattresses and blankets. I wonder if they've seen the tallises taken from the men who hoped they'd still have the opportunity to pray. Or the casees of shoes -- the cloth shoes people brought with them and the wooden ones they were forced to wear as part of their uniform.

Or the gas chambers. The scratch makrs on the walls from when people tried to claw their way out of death, holding on to a thread of hope long after the last glimmer had disappeared, despite the labor and the torture and the starvation.

I wonder if they've seen the crematorium that other Jews were forced to work in, carting the bodies cfrom the gas chambers to the ovens until one day it was their bodies in the ovens. Or Gas Chamber No. 4 at Birkenau, where the 450 Jews finally decided to do something about it.

Or the heaps of suitcases, clearly marked with people's names and nationalities, that prisoners took with them to the camps, but turned over immediately to the SS.

The barbedwire fences surrounding every nook didn't even face feedom for the 30 percent who were spared upon arrival (the others were sent directly to the gas chambers). Barbedwire separated different parts of the camps, not just the camp and the outside world.

Those who didn't give up on life, those who didn't end it by running toward the fences and either getting shot by a guard or electrocuted at the fence, often died facing the wall of death. Nazis forced them to kneel against this wall as they shot them all in the backs. Those who resisted were beaten into submission.

Everything I saw there was this documented Hell. So how can anyone deny that? And does the fact that there are people who can, who do deny it, mean that this can happen again?