One Day in September

There was something incongruous, one might say sacrilegious, about the black wrought-iron sign that stood out conspicuously against the cloudless blue sky. I remembered the words of Oscar Wilde in his poem “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”, in which he refers to “that little tent of blue that prisoners call the sky”. On that warm afternoon in September, dappled sunlight fell upon the bare earth, leaves were beginning to turn yellow and songbirds had not yet migrated south.

Still looking at the sign that arched over the entrance to the camp, I silently read it, repeating the words that were meant to convey Teutonic black humour: Arbeit Macht Frei. I tried to imagine the feelings of those tens of thousands of bewildered souls who, shuffling beneath the sign on their journey to oblivion, had also read the phrase. Had they pondered upon its meaning? Had they realised that Frei was a euphemism for death?

Seventy years ago, when Auschwitz was a place of human depravity and death, there must have been days when the sun shone and the sky was blue; times when soft breezes carried the scent of wildflowers across the barbed-wire fences and birds perched on the camp’s watchtowers.

Did the damned and dying see and hear such things? I like to think so. In savouring beauty, even for a fleeting moment, they would have quietly defied the Nazis’ attempt to dehumanise them. The human spirit, at the moment of its annihilation, would have triumphed over the worst profanity the world has ever known.

Walking around Auschwitz was a strange experience, made more so because I was uncertain why I was there. I could rationalise my visit by telling people that since I was staying at the nearby city of Krakow, I might as well see Auschwitz. But I knew that was not the reason.

Moreover, I could not claim that my visit was a pilgrimage, a journey of homage to victims to whom I was tied by blood because, unlike many whose relatives were murdered in Auschwitz, I had lost no one. Perhaps I felt a twinge of guilt.

So why was I there, in that corner of Poland where every stone and step and brick had become the via dolorosa of the twentieth century? Surely not out of morbid curiosity or to pursue a banal tourist experience.

Not until the poisonous ambience of Auschwitz began to seep into my soul did I realise that I was acting out the final scene of a personal journey that started half a century ago. It was an odyssey of research into books, newspapers, documents, as well as interviews and conversations that dealt with the Nazis’ “Final Solution”. The alpha and omega of my quest are encompassed in one word: why?

Why had the Germans turned on their own people and those around them, in emulation of a tumour that is programmed to destroy the fabric that gave it life? What rare genetic mutation had deformed the body politic to the point where behaviours so obscene that we find them hard to imagine became an everyday occurrence?

I once thought I had found a clue to answering such questions when I concluded that all people were capable of behaving like the Nazis. It was not a profound finding. Of course we could all behave like them, but few of us do. Having a dark side to our character is not the same as committing acts of evil.

The eternal question is not why evil exists in our heart but why some people choose to turn it into reality. Applying this to Germany of the 1930s and 1940s we are forced to ask how it was that people who we thought had reached the pinnacle of civilised behaviour could willingly enter the mind’s dark abyss to embrace the putridness they found there?

In choosing to embark upon a murderous quest on a scale unknown in the annals of human history, the Nazis not only cut a swathe through humanity, they destroyed hope of humanity’s ultimate salvation. Until Auschwitz one could at least aspire to redemption. Hope, which had always been man’s bridge to the transcendent, died at Auschwitz.

Had the Nazis been primitive savages, at least we could have appealed to Darwinian evolution for an excuse and come up with an answer of sorts. Had they been under the influence of drugs, we might have reached an understanding, no matter how unsatisfactory. But they were neither of these. 

In the course of my meandering around Auschwitz I paused at a display of footwear piled high into a mound that for me bespoke the Final Solution. Stolen from terrified innocents of all ages were shoes of many types and sizes: day shoes, workmen’s boots, dancing shoes, riding boots and children’s shoes; the footwear of old men and pretty young women, of wise grandparents and their beloved children.

There is something intimate about footwear. The longer it is worn, the more experiences it absorbs until it takes on something of the personality of its wearer. A pair of lady’s shoes covered in faded white satin caught my attention. I imagine they had been worn to dances, perhaps in Vienna or even Berlin. For a brief moment I caught a glimpse of a young woman circling a glittering ballroom, her smiling face lit by hopes and thoughts of future happiness. Now unknown, she is long since dead; her legacy, a solitary pair of shoes.

Even more personal, stored behind glass, is a vast maze of wispy human hair shorn from hapless prey in a final act of degradation. Most was taken from women prisoners and has faded over the years to a dull, funereal white that floats like cumulus cloud in summer sky. Intended to be woven into fabric for use in the manufacture of military uniforms, the hair is a testament to a grotesque practice. It is one of history’s ironies that many a Nazi would have worn strands of Jewish hair close to his skin.

To stand in a gas chamber, dimly lit, claustrophobic, its foetidness permeated with the taint of death, is a once-in-a-lifetime experience. That was what it was designed to be. Its disintegrating concrete walls reveal a core of red brick, its floor is cracked and stained with time. Someone has left behind a bunch of red roses.

I tried to picture the room as it once was, crowded with naked people shivering with fear whilst on the roof a lone Nazi minion wearing a gas mask opened a canister of poison gas. I turned away. This is a place where imagination fails and even the ghosts have departed.

Outside I looked up at the red brick chimneys rising above the ovens in which thousands of contorted corpses had been burned; a symbol of humanity’s moral failure. Their fires have long been extinguished, the charred bones crushed into powder and scattered to the wind. Nevertheless, I like to think that smoke-ash from the ovens will circle the globe for centuries, settling on every continent, so that all people will breathe in the microscopic residue of countless cremations. And so the German Reich will live for a thousand years—in the lungs of people the world over.

The only morally uplifting object at Auschwitz is the scaffold on which Rudolph Hoess, the camp commandant, was hanged after the war. Erected in the open air, in sight of Hoess’s picturesque house and garden, located beside the charnel-house that is Auschwitz, the scaffold is the sole remnant of justice.

And what of the 8000 Nazi men and women guards at Auschwitz who tormented, tortured and butchered their way into history? What was their punishment and fate? Only 5 per cent were brought to trial and 2 per cent were convicted of a crime. As Shakespeare wrote, “Oh judgement! thou art fled to brutish beasts, and men have lost their reason.”

The remaining 7800 guards, with no more than a twinge of conscience, would have shrugged off their crimes before returning home to loving families. Perhaps they went on to live happy, contented lives, believing they had served their country well.

After two hours I had seen enough of Auschwitz. Needless to say I came away not having found any answer to my question. There may not be one. Yet we the living have an obligation to the dead and to our consciences to continue searching. Perhaps the final comment lies with Primo Levi, to whom an SS officer said of Auschwitz, “Here, there is no why.” 

Dr Brian Wimborne is an historian who lives in Canberra.