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January 29, 2005

Auschwitz remembered-II

Watching the box night before last, as the news covered various memorial services and events to commemorate the holocaust, I was struck over and over again by the dignity of the survivors attending - and their huge courage in revisiting the place which must have held such horror for them. One channel ran an interview with the curator of the museum at Auschwitz, and I listened as she spoke with some passion about how they managed the place and what it meant to her - a young woman who could not have been more than 40 - yet she spoke about the people, the events, and what the victims suffered as if she had been present. It meant a great deal to her.

Even watching on the television as it showed the demolished gas chambers and partly destroyed crematoria, the rows of "barrack" blocks, and some intermixed film of the camp as it was, it struck me that it is full of such melancholy that it must forever be a place of disquiet. I suppose that, too, having, as a child, known a family among whose members was an emaciated and frequently ill cousin who had survived Auschwitz. She rarely spoke to us younger children, but was always in the background, always willing to help around the house, and always struggling to cope with a life of ruined health and injured mind. As I recall, she finally died when I was just entering my teens, and I later learned that she had not been much older than her early thirties although she had always seemed much older.

Thinking back on her as I watched last night, I realised that, even though I was not directly touched by the events there, Auschwitz is a place I would find very hard to visit. To go there as a tourist is to do the dead no honour; to go as a pilgrim may be to hallow the action that brought the misery.

For now I shall pray for the fallen - and for the hope that it can never happen again.

Posted by The Gray Monk at January 29, 2005 07:49 AM

Comments

Go as a tourist. You won't remain one (in the sense that you won't have a 'tourist attitude' by the time you leave). You have a heart and a soul, you'll do the dead no dishoner if you visit.

No, I have never been to Auschwitz. I have been to Dachau.

Posted by: Kathy K at January 31, 2005 05:01 PM