BLUE SKIES OVER AUSCHWITZ
Ottawa students experienced man at his worst, writes Gwen Smid
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It was surprising to see a McDonald’s minutes from Auschwitz.
During March break, I was a chaperone on Nepean High School’s European tour. We were on a bus with 46 students, driving to the most notorious death camp of the Second World War.
I had always pictured Auschwitz in the midst of an empty expanse, the sky overcast, nature reflecting our guide’s warning: “We’re about to enter one of the saddest places on Earth.”
Yet, the death camp is just an hour west of Kraków, situated in the Polish village of Oświęcim — more commonly recognized by its German pronunciation, Auschwitz.
As we neared our destination, we passed a KFC, a playground, moms pushing strollers, people walking dogs. Village life was obscenely normal, the sky a disrespectful blue.
I had the fleeting thought the visit might not be as bad as I had dreaded.
Upon arrival, we saw small cafés, bookstores and memorial shops. “Please don’t call them souvenir shops,” urged our guide.
We went through airport-like security and received our “whisper machine” headsets. Bursts of chatter and laughter erupted from a group ahead of us. Everything was too, well, normal.
After the security hall, we were led outside. Unintentionally, I let the door slam shut. The noise reverberated over the quiet courtyard. In front of me was the familiar black iron gate, the one I had seen in textbooks and documentaries, the one with the cynical inscription, Arbeit Macht Frei: “Work makes you free.” In an act of defiance, the B in Arbeit had been installed upside down.
I touched the barbed wire as we walked through the gate. This no longer felt normal.
“Auschwitz was a death factory,” said our guide. The Nazis murdered upwards of 10,000 people a day. At least 1,100,000 Jews were murdered in total in this camp alone. I looked at my students, my nervousness reflected in their solemn faces. But still, the sky was stubbornly blue and the birds insisted on singing.
Building after building lined the orderly streets, verification of the Nazis’ obsessive planning. In Block No. 4, we were faced with an enormous display of human hair. I walked its entire length, trying to see every single braid, every single lock, every single tiny little curl. Seventy years ago, camp liberators found approximately 7,000 kilograms of hair. It was in this room that many of my students dissolved into gut-wrenching sobs. I handed out tissues, comforting them until the enormity of this death factory smashed my composure. I left, gagging on tears.
We witnessed other displays of “Evidence of Crimes”: the prayer shawls, the piles upon piles of suitcases, the kilograms of eyeglasses, the baby clothes.
Every time we stepped outside to move from one building to another, I now welcomed the blue sky, its clearness a brief reprieve.
One student whispered that the birds could be the now-freed souls of murdered children, and Taela Liebenberg, Grade 12, afterwards wrote, “I have tripped over stones on the same roads dead children roamed. I have divorced those feelings for now; they are too much, too strong.”
A few days prior, our European tour had begun in East Berlin, and some of us had been admiring a graffitied, Cold War factory.
A local photographer approached; conversation ensued. When he learned we were planning to visit Auschwitz, he was surprised: “Why Auschwitz?”
We were surprised by his surprise. I responded that it was an important historical monument. He countered that there were countless important historical monuments worldwide, repeating, “Why Auschwitz?”
Why? Because even though life has continued in Oświęcim — as it should — with its restaurants and parks, with its blue skies and singing birds, 46 Ottawa students now bear testament to one of the worst chapters in our human story. May this firsthand knowledge continue to inspire young people to fight for the victims in our own time.