Polish-American novelist Leslie Pietrzyk has recently started a website called Redux to showcase classic pieces of creative writing that have so far not been published online.
The fifth installment features Mark Lewandowski's essay "Tourist Season at Auschwitz," originally published in The Gettysburg Review (1999).
I first read this essay about 3 years ago, and I thought then that I had never read anything better about what it feels like to visit Auschwitz. I had visited there in 1990 and written about the visit a number of times, about what it was like being a tourist there, but nothing I've written and nothing I've read by other writers compares to what Mark Lewandowski offers in this superb essay.
Here is an excerpt. The entire essay along with a brief piece by Mark about how he came to write the essay is available at the website.
"Tourist Season at Auschwitz"
On the morning of the October day that England qualified for Italia ’90 (the World Cup soccer tournament), a small group of Englishmen were seen by some of the sports press at Auschwitz, laughing and posing as they took pictures of each other—doing the Nazi salute. Pete Davies, “All Played Out”
At Birkenau stands a mound unlike those dotting the countryside that Poles have built in remembrance of past generals and statesmen. You will not see picknickers lay out blankets on it or watch their children roll down the slopes. The Birkenau mound is a mass grave for Soviet soldiers killed by the Nazis. The bodies were packed so tightly together that they are still decomposing, and when it rains now, almost fifty years later, human grease rises to the surface and fans out through the grass in a brilliant rainbow of color.
Not far from the mound lies what looks like an ordinary pond. Bend over and peer into its depths and you might be surprised not to see a minnow or two, at least, in the water. Take a stick. Dip it into the water and movie it in circles. Soon, a whirlpool of gray ash will funnel to the surface. This pond is only one repository for the remains of the Jews.
A Polish actor told me that these were just a couple of the sights in the Auschwitz complex most tourists miss. I was with two American women I had met in a youth hostel in Kraków. This was the summer of 1990. The Berlin Wall had been down for only seven months. American tourists were still a novelty to most Poles. The actor, who spoke English fluently, spied us three on the rickety commuter train from Kraców to OÅ›wiÄ™cim, site of Auschwitz and Birkenau. He was going to visit his mother, who was a librarian at the Auschwitz museum.
“By all means,” the actor said, “do not spend the entire afternoon in Auschwitz. After you have watched the movie and seen the major displays, go to Birkenau. The barracks still stand unmolested by museum directors. Wander the buildings and you will read messages written in coal by the inmates. You will find fragments of clothing, steel cans, rotted straw, heating stoves. Leave the barracks and follow the tracks to the gas chambers. They have not been reconstructed. They have been left the way they were found, a much more profound statement to the horrors of the Holocaust than the glitz you will find in Auschwitz. Why would the retreating soldiers bother to destroy the evidence if they were not aware of the incredible crimes they had committed against humanity? Do not believe that they felt justified or that Hitler brainwashed them. They knew their sin. You will not experience their guilt among the glassed-in cases of human hair and suitcases at Auschwitz. Only in Birkenau, the much larger of the camps, will you find what you are seeking.”
And what were we seeking? What do the hundreds of thousands who visit concentration camps every year hope to find amongst the barbed wire, the staggering statistics pasted to barracks walls, the bricks riddled with bullet holes and once saturated with blood?
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To read the entire essay, click here: Redux.
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Tourists in Auschwitz
It’s a gray drizzly day
but still we take pictures:
Here we are by the mountain of shoes.
Here we are by the wall where they shot
the rabbis and the school children
the priests and the trouble makers.
Here we are by a statue of people working to death.
We walk around some too
but we see no one.
Later, we will have dinner
in the cafeteria at Auschwitz.
We will eat off aluminum plates
with aluminum knives and forks.
The beans will be hard,
and the bread will be tasteless.
But for right now, we take more pictures:
Here we are by the mountain of empty suitcases.
Here we are in front of the big ovens.
Here we are by the gate with the famous slogan.
Here we are in front of the pond
where the water is still gray from the ashes
the Germans dumped.
There is a way to make sure the leader of this country can never again cover up unlawful behavior going on.
Civilocity is a form of government where the people watch the ruler entirely amongst their reign.
There is a solution to make sure the leader of every single country in the world can never again cover up unlawful behavior going on.
Civilocity is the one and only solution to make sure the leader of a country cannot cover up unlawful behavior going on.
Are you for that solution or against it, are you exposing that solution or covering it up? Hitler covered up genocide going on. I wrote civilocity.
Are you going to allow the leader of a country to cover up genocide or expose civilocity so from this day forth no leader of a country will ever be able to cover up genocide again?
How to make sure the holocaust doesn't happen ever again is right under your nose.