Showcase Sunday - Auschwitz - Ovens Should Bake Only Bread

Today is Sunday... which means the Showcase Sunday challenge. Showcase Sunday is a chance to resurrect your best work, and perhaps get some new eyes on those posts that took hours/days to make.

Lets set the scene... it was November 2018 and I had been chilling in Krakow at steemfest 3! The conference days had flown by in a heady cacophony of knowledge and project presentations, networking and great food.

Saturday had arrived, and I had opted in to taking the excursion to visit Auschwitz. I had only a mild hangover after drinking in moderation at the bowling the night before and I'm so glad I showed this restraint.

Auschwitz is one hell of a sobering experience, but I don't think I was fully prepared for the emotional cluster-bomb these fields and barracks would have on me. The place is what it is; a haunting and deeply effective monument to the attempted genocide of a whole race.

This travel blog I wrote a week after I returned from Krakow says it all a million times better than I could now. The poem included in this blog is one of the best I've ever written on steem, and I feel that it captured the insane levels of casual cruelty that were a mainstay at Auschwitz & Birkenau, along with how the place made me feel on a psychological level. I'm welling up now remembering that day trip. After rereading the blog and poem, I'm reminded of the intense and odd feeling I had all the way around the site, like the ground had soaked up the soul of evil.

I can't really say it any better than at the end of the poem (see below) - ovens should bake only bread.

This trip was one of the hardest things I have ever experienced emotionally and to an extent, I feel a little overwhelmed blogging about it now. But it is important to explore the world through the lens of our own perception, both good and bad. This is how stories are passed on, how lessons are solidified, by the retelling through a myriad of different eyes. What one person may write, about the history, facts and figures of the holocaust might speak to a certain reader and pass the message of history along. Equally, some might read a poem and feel the deep abiding horror of what happened at Auschwitz in the depth of their stomach just as I did. All perspectives are valid, and needful, to perpetuate those lessons.

Putting a face to the name. That title speaks to something I think is at the root cause of why the human species can perpetuate such levels of genocide. How people who consider themselves compassionate can turn aside and look the other way when such extreme violence is being visited upon a whole group of people. If it is made easy for them to not put a face to the name it's possible for them to follow a twisted logic of dehumanizing people. I also think the psychology of fear has a lot to do with why the Nazi's got away with such atrocities along with the rhetoric of hate based on race, religion and stereotypes. It is a hard circumstance to analyse and I am aware that many non-Jewish people did resist and help/hide people persecuted by the Nazis, helping them to escape the holocaust.

The wall of pictures in Auschwitz had a profound effect on me psychologically. I shrugged it off at the time, but if you look closely in the picture above you can see that Aurelia Bienko is smiling. Is this a case of a learned reaction? Smile for the camera, so to speak. Or did she still have hope and belief that this wasn't a death camp that she had been brought to at the time the picture was taken. It was a strange thing to think about, but these are the questions I wanted to ask her and possibly an emotional defence mechanism for me as I walked down that hallway. Her smile was the thing that jumped out at me among the many faces on that wall because it seemed so out of place among those others so full of hopelessness and suffering. Faces of fathers bereft of family and mothers separated from their children. Or maybe hers was a smile of defiance. We will never know.

I put a name to that face in a sea of faces because something that seemed out of place caught my attention. Don't get me wrong, each and every one of those pictures hit me hard, their names, the senseless nature of their deaths, the description of their jobs and family, all made it personal. I was seeing people some of whom I undoubtedly would have got along with, some maybe had disagreements with, and perhaps our personalities would have clashed, but all people just trying to get on with life. My emotional reaction and fixation on Aurelia was simply a way to cope with the realization that over a million people, just like you or me, were exterminated over a twisted ideology.

Below, is a library of pictures of the main Auschwitz concentration camp before we move on to Birkenau. I have written a poem at the end of this post which expresses my impressions much more clearly than I find myself able to in prose.