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On arrival at Auschwitz, my guide took me through those infamous gates that bear the words ”Arbeit Macht Frei ” (work sets you free). He explained that Auschwitz is made up of three camps, this smaller section having been turned into a museum. The largest — by a factor of 10 — is Birkenau, a few kilometers up the road. It was there that the selections and mass killings were carried out and over which the flypast was due to take place at noon.
Many of the brick barracks of Auschwitz One have been turned into exhibit halls in which the grisly contents of the display cabinets are every bit as harrowing as the photographs on the walls. Of the thousands of victims’ shoes, I only noticed the children’s sizes and amongst the bales of human hair I was transfixed on the little plaits and pigtails. Walking through these halls, struggling to keep my composure, I passed small tourist groups clustered around their guides. I noticed many were staring at me. I seemed to be the only one there wearing a kippa. There were backward glances from Chinese eyes and Latino eyes, Indian eyes and Pakistani eyes — many of which, I felt sure, had never seen an Orthodox Jew in the flesh.
I was preoccupied with those glances when I came upon two small display cabinets and saw in them something totally unexpected. I thought of my father hiding that solitary Chanukah candle under his bunk and felt the tears well up. I rushed toward the nearest window and cried. My guide could not understand why, after the shoes, the hair, the suitcases and the glasses, I should be so affected by a simple collection of old shoe-polish tins.
By the time we were ready to move on to Auschwitz Two, I had seen my fill of neatly spaced barracks that had been used for all manner of cruelty and experimentation as well as the jailhouse and its adjoining yard that had been used for executions by firing squad. Wooden watchtowers strung together by electrified fences surrounded all of this orderly abomination.
The rain had stopped by the time we arrived at Auschwitz Two — Birkenau. The sky was still a forbidding deep grey, matching the feel of this sprawling campus of death. I stood under the arch through which the cattle train bore my father and his parents into this hellish place on a chilly October morning in 1944. I later realized that I had been standing there at 11 a.m., the same arrival time recorded in my father’s book. With my guide, I climbed the stairs to the main watchtower above the arch. Strung out before me was the deserted railway track. Halfway down its quarter-mile length it forked to form the infamous central ramp on which Hitler’s SS carried out their murderous selections.
On either side of the track there were endless ranks of chimneys standing like sentries, each within a rectangular brick outline, evidencing where barracks once stood. My guide explained how the retreating Germans had blown up most of Birkenau in an effort to hide evidence of their murderous work. Far in the distance, at the end of the railhead I pointed to a splash of blue. ”It’s the Israelis,” said my guide. Up to that point I had not realized they had planned any official gathering. Alienated by the stares in the museum halls and the specter of this place, I warmed at the thought of joining some of my own people. We descended the watchtower steps and started our trek down the line.
