Creative Nonfiction
by Barbara Davis
I stepped into a long, low
building at the Nazi death camp, Majdanek. Near the door a weathered wooden
sign said, “Bad und Desinfektion.”At the other end of the building was a
chimney.
A few steps inside the gas
chamber was a cement swimming pool for children to play in while the adults got
undressed for their showers. The shower heads were still in place. At the very
last moment, the children were gathered up and thrown like footballs over the
heads of their parents and the door slammed shut. There was a gas-proof peephole
on the door where SS men stood and watched for the 18 or so minutes it took
everyone to die. The glass on the peephole had been smashed.
After the killing, forced
laborers began the task of separating the bodies, putting them on carts, and
sending them to the dissection room to be searched for gold teeth and jewelry. The
walls and ceiling of the huge room bore sea-blue stains from the Zyklon B gas. Two
carbon monoxide tanks were bolted to the wall in one corner, and hundreds of metal
Zyklon B canisters, still full of pellets, stood in tall stacks behind chain
link on the other side of the room.
My eyes stung in this place, my
lungs clenched like fists. I grabbed at a wooden beam in the middle of the room
and closed my eyes. When I realized that thousands of people had clung to this
very beam while sucking their last breaths, I didn’t jump back but held the
beam even tighter.
“I’m here,” I told them. “I
feel you. I will tell what I’ve seen.”
This was Christmas Eve, 2005.
My sister and I had tormented ourselves about whether
or not to go to Poland for several months. She felt great trepidation about
jumping into such a dark and surreal situation—a ten day tour of nine Nazi concentration and death camps—as
her introduction to human rights activism. She had been invited onto the tour
by a fellow professor who specialized in human rights. She invited me to come
along for moral support. Both of us cringed at the names of some of the camps
on the itinerary: Treblinka, Sobibor, Auschwitz, Birkenau. But, it seemed this
was a once in a lifetime opportunity. As the summer months changed into fall,
we decided to go.
From December 18 through December 28, 2005, we rode
trains and vans and buses at top speed through Poland, the madness of one camp
building on the next, with only Christmas Day off to rest.
After landing in Warsaw, we took a long train
ride up to Gdansk, and from there visited the concentration camp Stutthof. The
barracks were preserved, with exhibits including the striped uniforms and
wooden clogs worn by inmates who had been shipped in from the occupied
countries of Western Europe. One of the uniforms had a pink upside-down triangle
over the left breast. A homosexual. While the other members of the tour
remained in the exhibits, I walked alone on a long road to the back of the
camp, where a tiny brick gas chamber stood with the crematorium nearby. Next to
the exit of the gas chamber was a huge wooden Star of David and a Christian
cross. Behind these an old cattle car, used to transport the prisoners, sat on
a section of tracks. It looked barely
tall enough to stand up in.
I went into the crematorium, where wreaths of
plastic flowers sat in the mouths of the ovens. Each oven had a metal slab
inside it, onto which a body would be placed to burn. I reached into one of the
ovens and touched the wooden handle of the slab. I was here, really here. This
was no black and white documentary. Someone had been gassed or worked to death
and burned on this slab. A student from the tour came inside the crematorium
and I yanked my hand away, fearing I had desecrated this place by touching it.
Maybe I had.
Our next camp was the death camp Chelmno. Here
the old and infirm, the mentally unstable, the Poles and Jews and Gypsies of
the region, and many thousands of Soviet POWs had been loaded into huge vans
converted into gas chambers and then driven, suffocating, the 2.5 miles to
their own burial pits in the woods. Witnesses had heard screaming as the vans
passed. We drove the exact route the vans had taken, from the old manor where
the prisoners had undressed and left their belongings, to the forest camp,
which now consisted of nothing more than mass graves in a huge clearing in the
woods.
Each grave measured approximately 280 yards long
by 20 feet wide, and there were enough of them to hold 340,000 bodies. I could
see outlines of the graves in the deep snow. I dug a few inches down until I
found beautiful black marble that delineated the edges of the grave. Its gold
flecks shone in the sunlight, which warmed and calmed me through a huge down
coat and gloves and arctic snow boots. It was strange, but I could breathe here.
Similarly, at Treblinka, where an estimated 1.2
million people evaporated, the camp suddenly took on the appearance of a
landscape out of Narnia. This was to become a recurring, uncomfortable sensation
in Poland—the grievous history of the camps versus the incredible beauty of
that particular winter, with snow bending the great forests and sparkling in
the sunlight and against the brilliant blue of the skies. Later, my sister told
me she doesn’t remember the brutality of Treblinka, but the magic—a place she
often returns to in her mind to experience eternity.
Every time I hear a certain car company lauding
“the power of German engineering” on TV, my stomach does a flip and I remember
the indoor railroad track leading from the gas chamber to the crematorium at
Auschwitz. When I saw the cart for bodies on a railroad track—a railroad track inside the gas chamber—I thought I would
throw up. Of all the death machinery I had witnessed on this tour, this indoor
railroad track brought into shocking focus the incredible swiftness and ingenuity
with which the Nazis dispatched their victims. I covered my mouth with my hand,
paid quick respects at the crematorium, and then fled the building.
At Birkenau, I climbed the steps of the famous
elevated train station whose image so often shows up in Holocaust documentaries.
From up inside the station, you can see the train tracks stretch the full length
of the immense camp, which was built to receive 100,000 forced laborers and
exterminate millions of Jews. About halfway down, the tracks split; one line
goes to the selection platform, the other straight back to the blown up ruins
of the gas chambers and crematoria. I walked the tracks alone, picked up a
rock, put it back down. Around the ruins the ground was soft and spongy
underfoot—ashes—all that is left of the 1.5 million people who perished at that
place, the site of the greatest massacre in human history.
Incredibly, a blue enamel mug sat in plain sight
on one of the ruins. I picked it up and checked inside—it was rotted through, a
real relic from the Holocaust. Had some SS officer sipped his coffee from that
mug while looking through the peephole of the gas chamber? I didn’t know what
to do with it. For a moment, I wanted to hide it inside my coat and take it
home with me. Then, horrified at myself, I tossed it back onto the ruins. It
dropped between the bricks and vanished from view. This was my last experience
at a Nazi death camp. I had seen enough.
The day we left Poland, we stopped at Oskar
Schindler’s factory in Krakow. The guards let us slip inside the gates, though
the museum was not yet open to the public. They showed us the steep staircase
that appears in “Schindler’s List,” and let us go up the stairs to Schindler’s
office. Inside, his original furnishings remained. I kissed his desk. The
guards led us to a pile of rubble from recent renovations and told us we could
fill our pockets with tiles and anything else we found. While the rest of the
tour went inside the concentration camp where Schindler’s workers had lived, I
stayed on the bus and fingered my jagged pieces of tile.
I cried on and off for a month after the long flight
home from Warsaw. I winced at the sight of old brick chimneys. I read every
book on the Holocaust I could get my hands on and it still didn’t begin to make
sense to me. Nine years later, I am still nauseated by the crash course in
hatred I took in the winter of 2005. I will never fully understand what I saw.
But I do understand that the camps in Poland must remain intact to tell their
story, so that it never happens again.