The Art

Flying home there was a consensus within the class, what do we say when people ask how our trip was? Did we have fun? This was not a trip in which you go home and say “I had fun” like our peers who went on other trips for their spring breaks. This was a learning experience that I think all of us still need to process.

On Wednesday of our trip we went to the exhibit for Mariana Kołodzieja, he was a Christian Pole who was in Auschwitz One. His experience at the camp was too difficult for him to speak about so he drew. He created these intense and extremely intricate pieces that depicted the prisoners, the SS guards, and demons. For the amount of work he created and how he himself had it displayed we needed more time than we had to really look at all the pieces and view his story. That night when I laid in bed, I closed my eyes and saw the desperate faces he drew. (Seen in the picture to the right)

David Olère, another artist we saw who shared their experience through painting. Olère was a sonderkomando, a prisoner who was forced to work in the crematorium, the one who took the bodies from the gas chamber to the fire. His work was dark and beautiful just as Kołodzieja’s work, although for me maybe a little less haunting. Olère’s work depicted the experiments done on women, the process the sonderkomandos put the corpses, and depictions of the cremation process. One of the painting that stuck out to me most was titled “Freedom begins at the top of a chimney.” The part of the painting I remember was in the chimney smoke of the crematorium there were ghosts or souls of the victims. I think it depicts how horrible the conditions were at the camps and how many would be murdered every day.

The sign for David Olere’s exhibit at Auschwitz 1    

In class our professor quoted Michael Berenbaum when he referred to reflecting on the holocaust is to think of the absence of presence and the presence of absence. This quote relates to the work of Mariana Kołodzieja and David Olère because the presence of their work is a presence of absence, highlighting the 6million souls lost in the camps. I personally felt the absence of presence walking through Birkenau. Walking through the children’s barracks, block 16, there was a mural when you first walk through the door. The Museum doesn’t know who exactly created these but know it was most likely another prisoner who wanted to give the children a more permanent gift.

Before this trip I knew I would learn about suffering and the effects of hate. I did not expect to see amazing works of art that fought against the hate. I still do not know what I will tell family and friends when they ask if I had fun but I know I can say I learned more dimensions than I thought I would and overall had a great trip through Poland.

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The Kindness When Faced With Hate

Throughout our tours of Auschwitz One and Birkenau our tour guide was telling us stories of survivors from the camps. These stories consisted of brutalities they faced at the hands of the SS officers although the ones that have stuck with me are ones of prisoners helping each other and the help they were given.

Birkenau was created to house more prisoners when Auschwitz One ran out of space. For this reason, many of the stories of kindness came from there. One story was of the building in the women’s section of the camp where they housed sick prisoners temporarily before they were sent to the gas chambers. (seen in the picture to the right) When the building was so cramped, they had the women stay out in the courtyard exposed to the elements, they were given no food or water. In the winter if there was snow other prisoners would make snowballs and through it over the wall for the sick to have some type of water. Another story from that barrack was of a female prisoner, that worked in the “Canada Houses” or the storage and sorting houses of the possessions that the prisoners brought with them. She made a friend, which was rare since the life span at the camps was an average of three months. The friend had gotten sick and was put into the barrack to wait to go to the gas chamber. The female prisoner smuggled some gold she found in the Canada houses and tried to bribe the kommando with it, although they refused and wanted a body for a body. The woman took the officer and dragged a dead body she found and exchanged it for her friend. This story really got to me because I thought about how much I treasure my friends and would want to be with them as long as I could in a hell like Auschwitz, Birkenau. That inmate as well as others who worked in the Canada houses would smuggle goods back. There were stories of a girl who wore shoes way too big for her in order to wear a second pair of shoes inside them to smuggle back to other inmates.

Smuggling was a kind gesture that saved lives inside and outside the camps. While here we went to a pharmacy in the Bohaterów ghetto in Krakow belonging to Tadeusz Pankewicz. Pankewicz was a Christian pharmacist who was told to move out but convinced the Germans that because there were going to be two hospitals in the area that it would make sense to allow him to stay to local. They agreed and Pankewicz stayed in operation giving medications to the Jewish people of the ghetto for free and allowing to use his back door for escape. Today we consider Pankewicz a righteous gentile which means, a non-Jewish person who helped save the Jews. In the book The Holocaust Kingdom, by Alexander Donat, the wife Lena Berg worked in a pharmacy which saved her. Donat recalled that to have a job kept you from being deported. Shops described in The Holocaust Kingdom and Pankewicz’s saved Jews in a multitude of ways.

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The Almost Forgotten

Growing up in the United States our education I believe was limited throughout our High School and Middle School educational careers. Growing up we learned about the camps, who was targeted, why and how it happened but we never talked about how close to success the Nazi regime was to eliminating the Jewish population. When we were in Oświęcim we visited the Jewish Community Center where we learned about the Jewish community in the town of Oświęcim. We learned of how the Nazi’s destroyed all of the synagogues except the one that had become part of the Museum we had visited. The only reason that one survived was because the Nazi’s used it as an ammunition bunker and storage. A building of religion and piece turned into a storage unit for the tools to kill the exact people who originally owned the building. With the destruction and repurposing of the synagogues the Nazi’s did the same to the Jewish graves. A cemetery in the town had been destroyed, the tomb stones knocked over and broken. Volunteers over the years along with the efforts of the Jewish Center have worked to restore the tombstones even though they know they’ll never be able to reconnect the stones with the people they represent.

The above images are of the Jewish Cemetery with the volunteer’s numbers in attempt to catalog the work.
We were informed that the tombstones were also used as paving stones for the roads. They would lie the stones down with the writing face down to further desecrate the memory of the person. The Nazi regime attempted to destroy evidence of the Jewish people ever existing, not only did they destroy the people’s past, but they repurposed their artifacts for their advantage.

When visiting Auschwitz One the other day we saw more examples of this destruction and repurposing. In my early schooling I had known that the Nazi’s had taken the clothing and valuables of the prisoners to help supply the German people back home. Although the extent of this I never knew. What really disturbed me was the fact that the SS would have the sonderkommandos, the prisoners forced to handle the dead bodies, cut the hair off the corpses of women from the gas chambers so their hair would be taken to be made into textiles. Textiles that would then be turned into mattresses, shoe lining, and coats for German soldiers. This to me was the worst possible interpretation of “reduce, reuse, recycle.” This was using the innocent victims as sheep. When I first saw the exhibit that exposed this atrocity I was immediately repulsed, I held back the instinct to scream in disgust.

In class back home we had talked how trying to wrap one’s head around six million deaths were so incomprehensible. Our professor shared a paraphrased quote from Rabbi Marc Gellman’s eulogy on September 24, 2001 for the victims of the 911 terror attack. Rabbi Gellman said six thousand (911 victim count) and six million, sounds more like scores and to instead think of it as one person dying six thousand or six million times. (For more on the eulogy the link is provided bellow.) I still couldn’t wrap my head around that concept until we saw that hair exhibit. Seeing the hair made it easier for me to see the six million. At the time of liberation, they found 300 bags of hair, equaling seven tons of hair. They had on display for a lack of a better term two tons of the hair, this in no way is close to the six million but it helped me at least put it better into perspective.

In one of our late-night group reflections, we were asked to use creativity to describe what we were seeing. An image of the 1,100,000 Jews who died in the concentration camps and the ones not counted in the one million, fading away with their symbols and culture. The Nazi’s were so close to wiping out the Jewish culture from eastern Europe.

Click here for Rabbi Marc Gellman’s Eulogy: https://eu.thenewsstar.com/story/life/faith/2016/09/16/reflections-eulogy-delivered-years-ago/90482788/

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