Auschwitz, pt. 1

No jokes in this one. The text below the video is the transcript and nothing else, so there's no need to go further than the video unless you missed something.



I walked into Auschwitz already knowing the facts, not just about the Holocaust, but the Auschwitz museum itself. I knew about the ash pits at the Birkenau complex, and I knew about the stockpiles on display, rooms full of property stolen from those killed in the gas chambers. I knew about the suitcase room and the pots-and-pans room and I was especially aware of the shoe room, which I thought would be the most disturbing one since I knew high heels and little baby shoes were large parts of the collection.

But after seeing the suitcases and the pots and pans and the shoes, I entered a room I didn’t know about: the hair room. The main exhibit was a glass case like the others, but instead of material belongings on display there was a mountain of human hair recovered by Russian soldiers after the camp was abandoned. Beside the glass case lay several yards of cloth. The guide didn’t need to explain it, but he said the hair was shaven from women’s corpses and made into blankets, nets, and clothing, while the bodies were burned to ash in one of the camps’ several crematoria. Much of the ash was poured into pits, today marked by four stone columns decorated with flowers given by survivors or family members or sympathetic visitors. What wasn’t thrown into the pits was sold as fertilizer.

There is a difference between reading about a tragedy and viewing a part of its aftermath with one’s own eyes. When read in a history book or heard on television, a large death toll has little emotional significance because numbers that large are simply impossible for me to understand as individual units. A deep, intimate, sense of empathy is impossible since there are just too many people, too far removed in time, to allow anything other than a vague, general sense of sympathy and the knowledge that this many deaths is objectively bad, two things that do little to remind me of the full extent of the victims’ humanity and the perpetrators’ lack of it. That aspect is frequently addressed in history books by cataloging the gruesome ways the Jews and many others were tortured and killed, an approach that’s so depressing and so graphically violent in description that finding a greater meaning can easily be marginalized in favor of a morbid focus on the acts themselves. While academically sound, having an understanding based only on what one would find in a well-written history book does not carry the emotional weight brought about by seeing a ten foot long pile of what is essentially severed human tissue, taken by murderers to be woven into cloth.

It is impossible for me to estimate how many people were represented by that mountain of hair, and even if I knew I wouldn’t be able to accurately visualize that many human beings. But I think it’s far more important to simply know that every braid was cut from the head of a woman who had died in pain and fear, and that massing each human loss into one incomprehensible number diminishes the significance of each individual death - each individual braid. It’s important to see the aftermath with one’s own eyes, because in this new context of proximity, the events at Auschwitz do not constitute one act of mass murder so much as they are 1.1 million individual hate-driven acts of torture and homicide. 1.1 million...In the face of such an impossibly huge number, the least I can do is acknowledge the depth of their tragedy.