The Great Change: Turning Cathy into a Lawyer

The train I was running late for at breakfast was from Warsaw to Krakow. Once in Krakow, I then needed to change to some form of transport to take me to Auschwitz. However, I had no good information on how to do this. Even my Lonely Planet Eastern Europe book let me down. (The Polish chapter generally needs a lot of updating, if they haven't already done so.) It was hard to tell how close to the camp the train would get me, or how I would bridge the distance in any case. The book suggested taking a bus instead, but I couldn't find the bus stop in the confusion of Krakow Glowny and instead opted to take the train.

Which naturally turned out fine. When I got off the train in the town, I and all the other tourists converged on the train information guy. (There were no other signs or sources of information.) He couldn't speak English, and this wasn't his purview, but he knew all our questions and what the answers should be. (How to get there, and how to get back.) I ended up splitting a taxi with three other English-speaking people since it seemed easier than taking a bus. The cabbie charged us 15 zloty instead of the usual 10 ("It's a holiday," he said) and so we arrived at the camp by taxi.

It turns out that it had been a good choice to take the taxi because I got there just in time for an English tour. It started with a 15 minute film, and then the guide walked us through several buildings. We then took the shuttle to Birkenau, 3 kilometers away, which is the place everyone really thinks about when they say, "Auschwitz."

Unfortunately my trip was rushed, and I was preoccupied with worrying about how I would get back to Krakow in time for my night train. In the end, when the tour ended in Birkenau, I took another cab (again 15 zloty!) back to the train station. The train was an easy 40 minute trip to Trzebenia, but the train we transferred to for the rest of the journey was packed. I boarded it like I would a crowded B-line train in Boston...

Arriving in Krakow I had about an hour and a half to spare. My initial impression of Krakow in the morning had not been good. The area around the train platforms was decidedly uncharming, and disconnected from any sort of central station area. I'm not sure I even believed then that any existed, and in the morning I had no time to explore. But at night I did, and I was curious. So I followed the path away from the platforms, and found at the end of the Victorian-style covered pathway a nice old restored station building. The overall aesthetic reminded me a lot of Disneyland, actually...

By then I was hungry so I wandered down a road to find some food. What I found was a lot of gorgeous, old, lit-up buildings. My initial impression of Krakow now seemed entirely wrong. It seemed like a quaint, medieval-feeling European city worth another visit (although perhaps maybe not for another year or so, to give them time to finish up some of the infrastructure construction they are working on).

In fact, Auschwitz should probably be visited again sometime when I have more time. The trip to Suwalki really sucked up most of my weekend – although that's fine, I'm really glad I went. But then I had to rush to get to Auschwitz (and, really, who wants to rush to go there???) and I couldn't really connect to the place because I was so distracted about the logistics of leaving.

At one point I worried that I'd perhaps somehow ruined the Auschwitz experience by doing the trip like I had. Then I mentally slapped myself, because how to you "ruin" Auschwitz? I perhaps failed to fully absorb the dramatic depths of its horrors, but not entirely. My memories of Birkenau in particular come to me in flashes. These camps need to be seen in person to really understand their scale. In some ways it's a scale more vast than you can imagine (for instance, it took 10 minutes at a rapid pace to walk from the end of the train tracks by the gas chambers back to the gate house), and in some ways it's also smaller (though the gas chambers/crematoria were crumbled ruins, they were smaller than I imagined). Having been there at least it will give better context to other Holocaust history I learn.

Still, if the experience seemed anticlimactic, I think there are several reasons. On my end, in addition to my distraction, I'd also seen another concentration camp that week. There was probably a saturation problem. But I've also heard others criticize the presentation of Auschwitz. It's hard to put my finger on it, but there's something about it that's disengaging. I liked my guide, so that wasn't really the problem. I think it may have something to do with the logistics. It should feel very dramatic to enter those gates. But it's such a confusing hassle to get there and figure out what's going on that it's hard to be emotionally wired to take it in properly. Also, you sort of stumble into these places. Whereas in Neuengamme and Dachau the entrances were themselves more dramatic. And maybe, too, the area could be better curated as a museum. The 15 minute film about the camp's liberation, though necessarily awful in its content, I thought was one of the blandest Holocaust films I've ever seen. Furthermore, ever since the Neuengamme guide pointed out that pictures of camp life were actually SS propaganda, I've not been able to take them as seriously as realistic representations of the horrors of the camp. However bad they may look, the reality was worse.

But as I said, the guide was good, and her tour was peppered with anecdotes explaining the psychological torture inflicted by the SS as much as the physical. It was also good to get her personal insight on some of these matters. In Suwalki I had noticed that the WWII memorials never referred to Nazis or Germans. They always used some form of the word, "Hitlerowcowy." I asked her what it meant and why they seemed to always use it. Apparently it means, "Hitler's People," and she thinks it's more accurate than saying either Germans or Nazis. With the latter, she pointed out, who were they? They were a political party. But that's like saying "communists." It's a party too, and it isn't even clear of which country. As far as using the term "Germans," it tars too many people. The atrocities themselves were only carried out by Hitler's People. On the other hand, she said she has started using the term "Germans" to make it clear that she does not mean Poles. She said she gets offended when people ask her how many Poles served in the camp. First of all, she noted, a Pole couldn't be in the SS even if they wanted to be – it was reserved only for Aryans, and Poles are Slavic. Secondly, they were victims too. The country was divided and fought over by Hitler and Stalin, the government was in exile, and Poles themselves were deported and imprisoned. Around the camp 5000 people were displaced as punishment for helping an early Auschwitz escapee. They were sent away, and their houses dismantled (the SS then used the bricks to build Birkenau).

Still, I suspect the history of Poles and Jews from that period is more complex than any one representation might capture.

Written for the most part 10/17, posted 10/18.