What Auschwitz Left Me With Part One: Auschwitz Didn’t Fall From the Sky

I went to Auschwitz yesterday with a strange feeling.

I’ve known about Auschwitz for most of my life. I’ve seen the photographs, watched the documentaries, read the history and heard the stories. Like most people, I knew what happened there.

But knowing something and standing in the place where it happened are two very different things.

I had also decided beforehand that I wasn’t going to take photographs.

That surprised me because I’m usually the person taking photographs of everything when I travel. But Auschwitz didn’t feel like somewhere I wanted to document as though it were another place I’d visited.

I was wrong.

As the day went on, I found myself taking more and more pictures.

Not selfies. Not photographs to post on Instagram or Facebook. I took them because I knew that, when I eventually went home, I would need something to remind me of what I had seen.

Something to make sure the horror I was seeing didn’t gradually become just another historical fact.

I decided not to publish any of them on social media.

That felt important to me.

While I was there, I saw people taking selfies, including on the railway tracks at Birkenau. I don’t know their stories, and I don’t know what was going through their minds, so I don’t want to judge them. People process difficult things differently.

But I have to admit that it jarred with me.

Those tracks aren’t simply an iconic backdrop for a photograph. They were part of the infrastructure that brought people into Auschwitz, many of whom would never leave.

There are places where I think the appropriate response is simply to stop and remember.

For me, Auschwitz was one of them.

The music

One of the things that affected me most was something I hadn’t really expected.

The music.

Just inside the entrance to Auschwitz I, beyond the infamous words Arbeit Macht Frei — “Work Sets You Free” — there is an area associated with the prisoners’ orchestra.

Music had been turned into part of the machinery of the camp.

Prisoners were required to march in formation to the music. They were exhausted, cold and starving, and those who failed to keep pace could be beaten or punished.

I’ve found that particularly difficult to process.

Perhaps because music means something very different to me.

Music has always been associated in my mind with healing, emotion, worship, memory and joy. As a Christian, I’ve always understood music as something that can lift the human spirit, express lament and help us connect with something beyond ourselves.

And here was music being used for almost the opposite purpose.

Something beautiful had been corrupted.

The Nazis didn’t just brutalise people’s bodies. They found ways of taking ordinary human things and turning them into instruments of control.

Even music.

I found that profoundly evil.

Six. Six. Six.

Later, at Auschwitz-Birkenau, we stood inside one of the barracks.

This was one of those moments when the scale of what happened became physical rather than historical.

The sleeping arrangements were almost impossible to comprehend. There were rows of crude wooden sleeping platforms, with six prisoners sharing what was essentially a plank-built bed. The platforms were arranged in three tiers, one above another.

Six people. Three levels.

As I stood there, I found myself thinking about the number 666.

For a Christian, 666 carries an obvious biblical association with evil and corrupt human power. It is the number associated with the beast in Revelation.

I don’t believe my watch was sending me a divine message, and I’m certainly not suggesting that it was.

But then I looked down at my pedometer.

6,667 steps.

It was one of those strange little moments that makes you stop.

Perhaps it meant nothing at all.

But standing in that barracks, surrounded by the physical evidence of what human beings had done to other human beings, the symbolism was difficult to ignore.

And it brought me back to something that had struck me throughout the day.

The evil of Auschwitz wasn’t abstract.

It had become organised.

It had buildings.

It had railway lines.

It had timetables.

It had paperwork.

It had uniforms.

It had rules.

It had punishments.

It had numbers.

And, horribly, it even had music.

Auschwitz didn’t fall from the sky

There is a phrase associated with the historian Jan Tomasz Gross:

“Auschwitz did not fall from the sky.”

I’ve found myself thinking about those words ever since I left the camp.

Because Auschwitz didn’t appear overnight.

There was a process.

Before there were gas chambers, there was propaganda.

Before there was mass murder, there was discrimination.

Before people were transported to camps, they had been identified, categorised, excluded and dehumanised.

Auschwitz was built by people.

People made decisions.

People followed orders.

People looked away.

People resisted.

People helped.

People betrayed.

People complied.

People survived.

That doesn’t diminish the responsibility of Nazi Germany for the Holocaust. Quite the opposite. It makes the history more disturbing because it reminds us that the Holocaust wasn’t some supernatural eruption of evil from nowhere.

It happened through human beings and human institutions.

And that is perhaps why Auschwitz leaves you with more questions than answers.

Because if evil always arrived looking like evil, perhaps it would be easier to recognise.

But it doesn’t.

Sometimes it arrives disguised as bureaucracy.

Sometimes as patriotism.

Sometimes as fear.

Sometimes as obedience.

Sometimes as indifference.

Sometimes even as something beautiful that has been twisted into something cruel.

And perhaps that is why I don’t want to leave Auschwitz simply thinking about Nazis.

I want to leave thinking about human beings.

About how easily we can divide the world into us and them.

About how quickly fear can become suspicion, suspicion can become contempt, and contempt can make things possible that once seemed impossible.

I came to Auschwitz thinking I was going to learn about the past.

I left wondering what it might have to teach me about the present.

And perhaps that is the real reason I took those photographs.

Not to say:

“Look where I’ve been.”

But to remind myself:

“Remember what happened here.”

Because Auschwitz didn’t fall from the sky.

And perhaps the uncomfortable question for all of us is not simply how something like Auschwitz could have happened then.

It is whether we are paying enough attention to the things that begin to happen before something like Auschwitz becomes possible.