Heart of Darkness

A few days ago, I went to Auschwitz.

 If that sounds like the start of a confession, it’s because there’s a large part of me that thinks it ought to be. Walking round the beautiful ancient city of Cracow, advertisements for bus tours to the camp seemed grotesque, like invitations to a public hanging; it felt out of place to  be watching people drinking coffee and eating burgers where hundreds of thousands of prisoners were murdered.

 The idea of the most terrible place on earth as a tourist attraction, like Niagara Falls or the Eiffel Tower, is too terrible to contemplate, and if my visit  played any tiny part in such a transformation, then I’m deeply ashamed. There are times when I think it would be better for Europe’s killing fields to be cleared of their buildings, ploughed and planted with grass for as much as we can imagine of eternity

 But it wasn’t like any tourist site I’ve ever visited. People were sombre, even a little afraid of what they would see once they had passed under the “Arbeit Macht Frei” gate. There were few smiles and, thank God, no selfies (although I believe there have been in the past).

 So why was I there? I’m not sure, to be honest. I knew enough about what happened there to be shocked by the sunshine and blue sky that bathed the place when I arrived. Surely this should have been dark and threatening, with ominous clouds? But of course, it’s people, not places, that do evil. 

 I’d seen pictures of the sad collections of shoes and clothing left by those about to die. I’d seen similar pictures of the pile of human hair and the tangled collection of spectacles without owners. Even for a dedicated atheist like myself, these were holy relics; I didn’t need to see them for myself.

 But I did. I walked round, choking up afresh at each new story, each new horror – the tiny woollen jumpers, the crutches and, God help us, the prosthetic legs that should have been helping people to move around. Now, they just stood there in display cases to remind us of the cruelty that people can inflict on each other.

 So why was I there? It’s a question that you can’t avoid, however you try, at Auschwitz. 

 I think I wanted to confront the horror of it. I have no direct connection with the place – no relatives who died there to mourn – but anyone born in the second half of the twentieth century will have had the shadow of all those deaths, all that killing and misery, there in the background of their lives.

 I wasn’t seeking to understand it – if anyone says they understand how Auschwitz could have happened, you can conclude with complete certainty that they don’t. Not even to see it, and certainly not to experience it. Which of us could ever do that? I think I wanted to stand there, in the presence of it, in the sort of awe that I imagine Christians must feel when they believe they stand before God. It was a life-changing experience. 

Not life-changing in any day-to-day practical sense. I shan’t ever use the word Nazi flippantly or thoughtlessly – but then I don’t think I ever did. I don’t see how anti-Semitism could survive a visit to Auschwitz, but I wasn’t an anti-Semite before. In particular, it hasn’t changed my support for the Palestinian cause – rather the opposite, when I think of the men, women, and children driven into Gaza and shuffling through road blocks as if they were entering and leaving a ghetto. It’s possible, though this is sometimes forgotten, to feel antagonistic towards the state of Israel and not towards the Jewish people. So in the days that followed, I got up, had my breakfast, and the did the things that I had to do just as I had done before.

 But it was life-changing in the way that I think of myself and the rest of the world. Grief for the victims is unavoidable – the children who left those woollen jumpers behind were like my grandchildren, the people who took those spectacles off for the last time were the same as me. How could anyone not feel a deep, unutterable sadness when confronted with these tiny scraps of limitless misery? I said I had no relatives to mourn there, but I think in such a place relationships, nationalities, and all the other distinctions that seek to separate us shrivel away to nothing. We are all relatives, all humans.

 And that’s the point. Everyone leaves Auschwitz with the words “Never again” in their minds. But grief is easy, it carries no price; and we know in our hearts that the words are hollow. No, no one has tried to eliminate an entire race in the way that the Nazis did, but there have been too many mass atrocities since 1945 for us to feel any confidence that nothing like this can happen again. 

 And we are all humans. Nothing that is human is foreign to us. And apart from the crowds herded to their deaths, each one of them an individual with their own hopes and fears,  there were the soldiers who were beating them and bullying them along on their way – the soldiers, too, who climbed on the roof to drop down amongst the victims the crystals that would be turned to gas by the heat of their bodies.

 I’m certainly not looking for sympathy for them. I have always hated, and still hate, the idea of the death penalty, but I can feel not a shred of grief for the camp commandant, hanged just a few short steps from the place where so many crimes were committed. Those men, all of them, made their own choices and if they suffered for the rest of their lives, they richly deserved the hell that they created for themselves. If they didn’t suffer, then there is something wrong with the way the world is ordered. We knew that anyway.

 But we are all human, Nothing that is human is foreign to us. And if we are human like the victims who died, and for whom we grieve, we are human, too, like the criminals who killed them. 

 That’s the truth that haunts me from Auschwitz. That’s why the place should not be ploughed into the ground; that’s why people should be welcomed to stand in the presence of evil. And that’s the sense in which this was a life-changing experience.