Italian chemist, writer,
and camp survivor Primo Levi wrote in his “Self-Interview” in 1976, "I
returned to Auschwitz in 1965...I didn't feel anything much when I visited the
central camp. The Polish government has transformed it into a kind of national
monument.” What does it take to feel the past and to mourn at Auschwitz, I
wonder as a visitor, a scholar, an Auschwitz Jewish Center fellow, and a human
being horrified at the genocide that transpired here. What does it take to feel
in this place and in response to this place and its
history when Levi felt nothing upon his return to the camp twenty years after
his imprisonment there? In asking this question, I have in a mind a turn to
narrative, the definition of which I delineate here in a narrative of my visit
to Auschwitz. My own entry into Auschwitz has been through narrative.
The
reason I had come to Auschwitz, even to Poland, was because of a passion for
reading and teaching Levi’s two-part memoir, Survival in Auschwitz and The
Reawakening, of his ten months in the camp, in particular Buna-Monowitz, a
labor subcamp known also as Auschwitz III. His memories channeled into
narrative motivated my desire to apply to the Auschwitz Jewish Center Fellows
Program and to visit the sites about which he wrote, sites that had drastically
influenced his life course, his thoughts, and his writing career. He had even
admitted, bravely, I thought, that if he had not lived his Auschwitz
experience, he probably would have never have written anything. So, it was
Levi’s words and his need to write that emerged of his camp experience that I
carried with me into Auschwitz, even as I visited a place that I understood has
become a tourist site, a memorial drastically changed from the killing and
labor camp it was from 1940-1945.
Given my own narrative pull
to Poland, I want to explore here how a turn to narrative offers a way to
navigate the camp space, both mental and physical. Over my three days at
Auschwitz I experienced that the possibility that knowing, hearing, seeing, and
imagining individual and community stories of those deported to the camp opens
to the visitor space for grieving, feeling, and acknowledging the horror and
loss implicit in a visit to these charnel grounds. Levi’s humanity as it
emerged in his language and his writing over the years influenced me as a writer,
thinker, and scholar to seek out other such narratives during my several
day-visits to Auschwitz. In speaking of survival, Levi wrote that he felt his
steadfast interest in the human spirit and his determination to “recognize in
my companions and myself, men, not things.” So, too, narrative matters because
it grounds the visitor in the experience of individual human beings whose
memories as reflected in a written account, a sketch, or a photo—convey
relationship with others, emotions of hope and fear, and the courage that
documentation and reflection requires. Such narratives help visitors to connect
to the tenacious continuity of human experience within the camp. Finally, the
attuned visitor may discover several small stories, or the possibilities of such
stories, in the documentation and artifacts (Levi called these artifacts
“relics”) in the exhibits at Auschwitz.
Auschwitz-Birkenau is a state museum, funded
by the Polish government. It was established in 1946 by several former
prisoners who wanted to create a memorial at the site. Gradually, the memorial
developed into a museum. Under Communism the emphasis on memorialization was on
those “martyred” in the Second World War, with less emphasis on the genocide of
specifically Jewish prisoners. Since the early 1990s with Poland’s transition
to democratic government, there has been exponential growth in the preservation
of artifacts, including buildings, as well as in the scope of educational
programs and global
digital presence of the museum. At peak periods—from April to October—up to
15,000 people visit Auschwitz in a single day. Individuals must visit the camp
in tours, between 10-3, with a specially trained guide so that they stay
together, learn the history and see particular areas of the camp. Our guide was
Pawel Sawicki, a journalist and writer with the Press Office for the
Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and State Museum. Pawel noted that in visiting the
camp “it is individuals who are a problem; people must take tours.” What this
means is that individuals sometimes venture into areas not open to the public
or under renovation. The emphasis on groups helps to deter individual
exploration of Auschwitz. If individuals experience the camp only in groups, they
have little space for their own experience of the place. This loss of
individual experience constitutes the very reason that stories should
constitute a core element shaping the contemporary visitor’s time there. However,
due to sheer numbers of visitors, people must move quickly through exhibits
housed in the former cellblocks of the Auschwitz I compound. Keeping a steady
pace through narrow hallways that open into crowded exhibit rooms, a summer
crowd ahead and behind, the visitor may try to comprehend the enormity of
atrocity and the total loss for individuals, particularly for Jewish people, as
they arrived to the camp from transport trains. The effect of such absorption
is stupefying. Cases of hair, shoes, glasses, prosthetics—extensions of one’s
very self and one’s ability to function in the world—form decaying mountains of
intimate things that never should have become relics of genocide.
Inherent to the museum’s
visitation policy is the notion that how one conducts oneself is important to the
maintenance of the place as memorial and one’s experience of it. This is a
museum after all. Yet, some fellow visitors’ faces betray horror and disgust. A
restless silence periodically befalls us. In the long narrow room with
suitcases, hair, and children’s shoes there is a tangible atmosphere of
disbelief—in confronting the space and its remains. We visitors must confront
the evidence that systematic cruelties happened right here and how, if at all, we
respond. Sighs puncture the space, small words between intimates, people who
have known one another over time and who can, perhaps without misunderstanding,
confess their horror to one another. The sighs seem to surge into one sustained
out-breath of injury and mark a particular heaviness of repressed emotion in
response to these artifacts.
In the exhibits of
Auschwitz I there are placards, dates, numbers, statistics, reports of
transports, and historical photos, particularly of a particular Hungarian
transport in1944. But the visitor must glimpse these artifacts, rather than
linger and invite a potentially emotional response to them. In this space, I
sometimes stop to hear Pawel’s voice explain photos, documents, and artifacts. I
search for relationships within photographs of transports. These isolated
images move me. I gravitate toward particular moments, names, a face, toward
evidence of life. A photo of a man, in
prison clothes, seemingly well fed, and woman, newly arrived, talking, saying
something urgently, some last words, some counsel for survival, an almost
passionate moment on the train ramp. What could their relationship be? I may continue to read,
imagine, and translate that photo for the remainder of my life. A boy holding a
woman’s hand—his mother?—surrounded by children and women hurrying along, apprehension,
exhausted. Those photos will catalyze poems. I will return to them in search of
vaporous specificities of personal histories never available to me, never
narrated and remembered to anyone, but somehow shared with all of us.
Facing those photos from
1944, what stood out to me were instances, vitally important, between people on
the ramps as they were driven from trains and corralled and ordered into lines that
led towards the gas chambers. I knew that I would later attempt to express
those subtle yet vital interactions between people: moments of shared humanity,
of fear and love, of existing together in myriad ways, clinging to one another
in the face of grave uncertainty, subsumed with hope and desperation and aching
need.
“We must be disciplined
now,” Pawel tells our group, “in order to get through this tour and see certain
things.” We are slow, dragging, lingering over documents and relics. He may
lose us in the hallways. We will not have time to finish the tour. Disciplined,
orderly. Is this how we visitors are to behave here in Auschwitz? Yes, there
are lines, streams of people channeling through halls and stairways. Yet, even as
we hurry and attend to our guide, we see so little of the camp. Past the
shooting wall, through Block 11, in a line past cells—one of starvation, another
of standing, into which four men bent and crawled and stood for days. I rub the
Buddha charm at my neck. “How do you do this?” I ask Pawel who is just in front
of me. He grimaces. “Do you get used to it? It’s your job.” He hardens himself.
“Yes,” he says, always focused on moving us through. We enter the innards of a
gas chamber for a minute. We move through. Perhaps moving through is a glimpse,
a memory with intention to return to full life, an entry into and surfacing
from the historicized grounds of genocide and murder.
Pawel later shares that at
Auschwitz “the tour suppresses a need for internal narrative and also prevents
emergence of such a narrative.” The museum’s aim, he explains, is not to
encourage an emotional experience of the place but to impart historical
knowledge of the camps. I resist the idea that one can or should suppress an
internal narrative, but upon further reflection imagine the problems germane to
a museum space of sobbing and shaking, overtly horrified, grief-stricken,
enraged, or overwhelmed people. The priority is to recognize the place and the
things within it that point to an historical understanding over and above an
all-consuming emotional response to its energies.
At home with books and
solitude, a quiet afternoon, a garden at the window, I listen. I turn to songs
and voices, writing towards poetry, pleas for forgiveness, for life, full of
grief and understanding. In these crucial texts of Auschwitz I return to to
grapple with what Father Manfred Deselaers at the Center for Dialogue and
Prayer called the lifelong wound of Auschwitz. In dialogue with the fellow, Fr.
Dr. Deselaers said, “The task is to try to understand and to take this wound
seriously. It touches us and we think it has to do with us, but what?” Such a
lifetime inquiry brings one into an ethical engagement with the place of
Auschwitz and the words that remain among humans because of that place.
Auschwitz began with the killing of relationship, says the Father. My turn then
to narrative, both in visiting the camp and once home, reflects a deep desire
to mend relationships across time, place, and event. One such text that
nourishes that longing is Charlotte Delbo’s Auschwitz
and After, written twenty years after her repatriation to France. She
describes this no-place where she has landed from her native France,
transported into some dislocated deep winterscape, “We arrived on a morning in
January 1943. The doors of the cattle cars were pushed open, revealing the edge
of an icy plain. It was a place from before geography. Where were we? We were
to find out—later, at least two months hence; we, that is those of us who were
still alive two months later—that this place was called Auschwitz. We couldn’t
have given it a name.”
Seventy years later, its
name has burned in our consciousness. Of our contemporary relationship with the
camp, Pawel says, “We have only the place and words,” neither of which Delbo
and her compatriots had upon their arrival. It is words that persist and
flourish against the violence and against the forgetting of history. The modest, even minimal, remains of
buildings, monuments, exhibits, and words structure
humanity’s current relationship with the camp. For example, just 3-5% of all
original documents and records in the camp remain. Most were destroyed, some
were confiscated by camp liberators, the Russians. The loss of objects through
war makes potent the gradual shift to narrative as a means of processing and
feeling one’s visit to the camp. Such a shift indicates that this
memorial-museum space has begun to relinquish a focus on historical facts and a
lingering political ideological narrative (of Communist Poland) that speaks of
martyrdom over the uniqueness of individual lives for more personal,
narrative-driven guidance through the camp.
Such a turn manifests in an exhibit
at Birkenau of 2,400 photos found in suitcases and discovered after camp
liberation in 1945. It is reflected, too, when in Birkenau on the second
day of the tour, Pawel reads to fellows from testimonies he has carefully chosen to allow a feeling for camp
conditions and how those who lived and survived here experienced the place. At
the edge of a stand of birches, near the crumbling bricks of former gas chamber
five he reads to us from Henryk Mandelbaum recounting of his experience as a
Sonderkommando. Mandelbaum describes the process of killing within the gas
chambers, the extraction of hundreds of bodies and the subsequent cremation of
bodies. We are in Birkenau, the death camp, built to house more prisoners and
to accommodate a growing number of gas chambers to kill them. Ironically, the
vastness of Birkenau (“birch” in German), the spaces between structures and the
paths through woods and along marshy waterways, allows more time to think and
feel. In the former barracks, many of these buildings currently undergoing
restoration, Pawel reads a woman prisoner’s careful logging of the disease,
filth, and dying that developed in the female camp quarters.
These readings are somewhat new for our
guide. He holds in his hands white sheets of paper of laser jet words. He wants
us to hear firsthand accounts of the places we stand. How do we like it? Does
it add to our sense of the place and what transpired here? He seems tentative,
alert to our responses. As I leave the camp and consider prisoner memories
given over to others, such as we visitors, I contemplate what a turn to
narrative implies for historians, curators, educators, and press officers at
the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and State Museum—those
who preserve, present, and offer the memorial-museum and its space to those who
visit. This turn constitutes a sort of risk. First it signifies that
they make narratives essential to the visitor’s tour of the camps, so that
narratives hold the rich potential to figure prominently in one’s post-visit
recollections of the camps since they constitute a vital element in feeling and
knowing the camps as they once were, not simply as historical markers of
criminality and genocide, but as terrible and unforgettable spaces wherein
people lived, loved, struggled, and died. It is life that must be honored, not
en masse but as a unique and idiosyncratic expression of each individual. It
matters that the guide feels the same way. That he believes reading a narrative
memory is a way of remembering and feeling. It makes the guide, perhaps, as
emotionally vulnerable, as human, as are his visitors. His turn to story
validates all our stories in this place. This is not just an office, an
everyday routine for him; it is a place of words and through him we listen.
Narratives mean that visitors need time
and space to listen, to hear, and to respond quietly, as an interior process,
to the experiences of others. The importance of visiting the camp resides in
feeling the texture of life from the perspective of another human who
experienced the camp. The connection to narrative facilitates a particular, yet
enlarged, perspective of the camp as once inhabited by individuals. Delbo wrote
in her memoir, Auschwitz and After,
“Listening to their stories, I took the measure of the incommunicable.” It is
the incommunicable that one may hear in Auschwitz. That listening happens in a
space that fosters the ability to attend and feel narratives, both documented
and silent, of former prisoners. Levi confessed he could feel nothing there,
but because he gave me his story I felt something large and moving there,
something with which to grapple for my entire life. So it is that narratives
affirm our humanness in the exact place that sought to annihilate that
humanity.
