A Question and a Comment

Yesterday a question and a comment were left on Facebook for me in regard to my blog. The question was: what has being at the sites of the Holocaust meant to me; the comment: nothing that you are writing about is relevant or new. I will address both of these in today’s post.

Particular sites, most especially at Auschwitz, but also the Wannsee site of the infamous conference, and Sachsenhausen concentration camp, affected me in a physical/emotional manner that is not easily articulated. The word “evil” is used in so many contexts and ways that I hesitate to employ it, though I don’t have a readily available alternative. Actually being in those places, standing right in those locations where, for example in the case of the Wannsee house, a group of men coolly organized the infrastructure for the murder of millions of their fellow creatures, and then sat down to a convivial lunch with wine, I was struck dumb, chilled through and through with the horror and the magnitude of their crimes. I often have a sense of people, histories, and even places as holograms. “Being” there meant to me a form of actually “being” there with those men, with those events, in that époque. I absorbed their essence in some manner, felt the fanaticism (of some), the fears and/or doubts (again of some), and the ambition, power drives, and excitement (perhaps of many). Walking alone around the house, looking at the photos taken by the ever-present Nazi photographers, reading about the background and the eventual history of each of the participants,  and seeing photos and stories of people quickly and directly affected by the results of their deliberations, took me powerfully into the event itself.

This kind of immediate and visceral experience happened again at Sachsenhausen and at Auschwitz. On both occasions I could say little, as I was flooded by the images and the stories of the prisoners who had been incarcerated, tortured, experimented with, humiliated in every conceivable fashion, and in the main, murdered. Though I already knew a great deal of detail from previous readings, I was utterly unprepared for the power of the experience of being there, a dumb witness to the agony of their lives and deaths. Writing the blog as I went through our day-to-day itinerary, I could only describe what we had seen and learned. I did a bit of writing for myself about how I was feeling but didn’t include this in the blog, partly because I wasn’t clear enough in myself about it, and partly because I didn’t want the blog to be about me. We were travelling every third day, setting up in at a new hotel, in a new city, getting ready to meet with new people and to visit new places. My focus was on staying steady in the present and to continue to report on what we were doing and learning.

So that is a bit of an answer to the question of how the trip has affected me. There is, of course, much more, some of which I am only discovering as I go along. I know that I want to continue in some fashion, still not entirely clear to me, to learn and to work with my own particular interests in this profound historical experience.

With respect to the comment that was made that my writing is neither relevant nor anything new: I’m not too clear about the relevant part. It would have to be relevant to some particular question or area that was not specified, so I don’t think I can say much about relevance. As to its not being anything new, that everything that I am writing about has already been said by others, in the main I would agree with that statement. In fact in many of my posts I am giving a summary of things written in the past, for example, my many posts on the excellent Atlas of the Holocaust by Martin Gilbert. I began the post some weeks before we left for Europe as a preparation for myself as well as an introduction to anyone reading it who would be interested in this kind of overview of the terrain. As I have gone along I have also included the thoughts or arguments of authors that I have come across while away or since returning. Each of these have in some way been enlightening for me as I try to flesh out lacunae in my own knowledge or understanding of events. I don’t have and never have had a particular agenda for the blog. I wanted to go to these places and I wanted to write about them. That’s all. I knew that some people would be interested and would want to read about what I was doing, and, that some people would not want to read my posts for personal reasons, or, because they would find them unenlightening. All of that is fine with me.

The question that is with me now is where I go from here. That is not clear to me yet. I only know that I want to continue to learn and to study and to reflect on this period of history and what it has meant to our world and to our century because clearly issues of hatred and genocide remain with us. Thanks to all and any who have shown interest in my writing and to any who have taken the time to question or to comment upon it.