Prague 10/13 - Break ups and Auschwitz

Edited to be a little more tactful. Much good may it do me.

I have had a shitty fucking week.

I’m sorry, I shouldn’t swear. But it’s fucking true.

Let’s start Monday (so technically it’s a shitty fucking 6 days at this point). Monday I got in a fight with my mother that basically boiled down to her telling me that if I don’t get a job that uses my degree, it’s spitting in my parent’s face and I should “just drop out now” if that’s what I plan on doing. So there goes teaching English in a foreign country while I figure out what to do with myself.

Tuesday night I made the stupid STUPID mistake of confronting the guy I was seeing about why he’s been acting distant. Two weeks ago I had a meltdown that was triggered by stalking exes on facebook (always a bright idea) and stuck my foot in my mouth by telling him about it. The real issue is that I have a very low sense of my own self-worth. He fixated on me still being hung up on Lord Douchface (the ex who ate up five years of my life). We hashed that out, but he was being weird afterwards. I thought it was just because of me being an idiot, and it seemed to go away by the weekend. Last Sunday we had a very nice day, but then come Monday again he was being distant. Combined with some things he said Monday and Tuesday, I started getting the impression that something was rotten in Denmark. I confronted him about it, and got a very bad answer. Or, you know, maybe too good of an answer, because I got waaaaaay more than I bargained for. The fight lasted three hours and mostly ended with “we need to talk about this in person.”

Well, Wednesday night we did just that. Without going into detail (which I am sure I will do later), the conversation ended with the decision to reevaluate how we (really, he) felt on Monday after a weekend apart. So I stormed off in a huff, and even though he said he’d made a mistake about 90 minutes later, the damage was done.

Thursday I bought a ticket and whisked myself away with my roommates to Krakow… to see Auschwitz. Thursday itself was uneventful, though exhausting because I was dealing with the whole “dumped again” thing and then also trains aren’t super easy to sleep on. Helpful for introspection, meditation, and sorting out your thoughts a little better. Sleep, though, not so much.

Friday morning we got into Krakow at like 7 am, and walked across town to the hostel we stayed at. After putting our luggage away and sitting like zombies for a bit, we went to Auschwitz. Holy cow. I’m going to try to capture the experience, because it was not good, but it certainly left a mark. And it’s hard to stay mad at much of anything after something like that.

Call it a morbid curiosity with history’s darker side, but I was already pretty familiar with the history of Auschwitz – I did a report on Dr. Mengele in the 8^th grade that made a pretty big impact and more or less satisfied any need to know more about mass exterminations. But you can read about it all you want, you can watch documentaries until your eyes bleed, but nothing is quite like actually seeing it. When we first arrived, I was really rather shocked by how pretty it was. That sound wrong – it does and I know it – but that was my first impression. It was a sunny autumn day, and the grounds are covered in huge, beautiful trees with full foliage and well kept grass, particularly in the front. There’s a thriving sparrow community picking at cigarette butts and dropped crumbs, and the courtyard in front of the museum is full of people speaking in a variety of languages. It could have been any other historical museum. The tour eventually started, and in order to facilitate huge groups without shouting, they have you put on a pair of headphones connected to a radio receiver. Your tour guide speaks softly into a microphone, which transmits to your receiver through the whole tour. The effect is strange. Because of the padding on the headphones, everything beyond your own thoughts becomes muffled and loses a certain quality – it’s like a dream where you can’t quite hear what’s happening, though you know its happening all the same. And as they speak – a woman in our case – your perception of reality becomes reduced to her voice and the room you are walking through. The barracks – buildings? Cells? – where prisoners were kept have been converted into museum buildings. You walk through the grounds, which are beautiful, even if calling them that is sick, and into the individual “blocks.” The first one is about the collection of whole Jewish communities, where they came from, how they were taken, and so on. In here, it really didn’t feel real yet. There was reverence, and a little anger that it happened. But still the clinical examination of any other museum. I could have been looking at Greek pots. It wasn’t truly until the second or third building that my horror stopped being a respectful affectation. There is a whole room of human hair cut off the heads of Jewish women after being gassed. We walked in the room, and even though I knew it would be there, I jumped away from the glass as if there were hands reaching for me to pull me somewhere horrid. I stayed in that room the longest of anyone in our group – I couldn’t get closer than a foot to the glass. After that, I could feel my soul numb. What other reaction could I have? Details of the mass exterminations on an industrial scale seemed to slide over me like oil, leaving me filthy but unaffected otherwise. Each new fact – which was not really new, except for the reality of them I was suddenly confronted with – had less and less impact, until I thought the worst was over. It wasn’t. We went into a room showing large portraits of Mengele’s victims. The first one was of a two year old girl. I couldn’t tear my eyes off, and began crying. Crying silently, tears falling down my face without disturbing anyone. But again, I stayed in that room the longest, just staring at this little girl. I could feel the numbness being pulled away like an old scab, exposing something raw. We went through a building where Jewish prisoners were tourtured, and the scab kept pulling. But in the courtyard of that building…

They called it the execution wall, and against it now is a slate monument, adorned with candles and flowers. No one got close. Up against that wall, my mind superimposed all the faces I’d seen in photographs. I felt like I was staring at ghosts. Only not ghosts, as I didn’t feel anything like a presence in the way people describe ghosts. More… memories. Like the fabric of time was thin right there, and I was seeing these people the moment after, the moment their suffering was over, and right before they were allowed to leave. I didn’t cry – not physically. But my inner monologue, which resembles this blog very closely in that it is coherent, complicated, and constant, clarified and condensed into one single phrase. “I am so sorry.” Over and over and over. And it wasn’t an empathy thing. I have no idea how I could ever empathize with what happened in that camp. It was an apology.

From there we made our way, almost directly, to the gas chambers and crematorium. There was only a brief moment of clarity when I was able to distinguish between empathy and apology in front of that wall, and then all I could think was actually a scream. Inside I was screaming “No no no no no no nonononono NO NO NO NO NO NO NONONONONONONONO.” I couldn’t stop! I couldn’t be coherent! I couldn’t think anything but oh god, no, over and over again. Maybe I wouldn’t go in. But my feet pulled me forward of their own accord – and that is not a literary cliché, it was almost like an out of body experience – and I was suddenly in a dark room lit only by squares where the poison was dropped in from above. And the pleas of “no” stopped, and turned once more into “Oh, I am so sorry. We didn’t mean it!” We, as if I was there. As if I was responsible somehow.

And I kind of believe I was. In the clarity of my own horror, distinctions between “me” and “them” and “then” and “now” stopped existing, and all that was real was the death and the pain and the horror that had passed through that place. Passed through, but was no longer there. I felt, even in that room, a great cosmic sadness. But also forgiveness. Not for me, because I wasn’t at a point where I could feel it, but that those who had lived – and died – in that place had forgiven it. I felt like the hurt carried in that place was not the souls it happened to, but the horror of those left behind.

I felt physically incapable of speaking after that. I wasn’t the only one, though perhaps for me it lasted longer. Between Auschwitz I and II – Birkenau, I think I said less than ten words.

Now, a lot of people don’t realize that Auschwitz had three camps by the end of the Holocaust. There was the first, where the main museum stands, which was a converted Polish army barracks and base. There was the second, Birkenau, which was swamp land converted into a site of industrial murder, and a third called Monowitz, a labor camp. I could be wrong, but if I heard right, Birkenau was where the majority of Jewish prisoners were exterminated during the Holocaust. If you can, google it. There’s a giant brick arch the trains would pass through, and running up the length of the camp are two parallel train tracks. In the middle is a gravel walk, where “selections” took place. Those chosen for the camps were separated, and those chosen for the chambers were marched up the gravel walk to the two main gas chambers, and two make-shift chambers in the woods. The tour starts at the gate, and walks the length of this gravel road. At this point, though I’d regained most of my cognitive functions, the only way to describe what I was feeling was “My soul hurts.” And it did. It felt like someone had taken a crowbar to my soul’s midriff and I was spiritually doubled over, trying to catch my breath. Walking up this gravel way where the fate was decided of millions of people, I lost it. When I cry, there is always a watershed moment where I make a conscious decision to let it out. That didn’t happen this time. One moment I was walking, the next I was surrounded by a group of strangers, sobbing openly. There were no words, which never happens to me. Just crying. Just sobs shaking my frame gently, and warm tears, and an ache so deep in my soul I thought it was permanent.

At the end of this path lies the Holocaust memorial. The memorial itself looks like rubble until you examine it, and then deliberate shapes begin to appear. I couldn’t grasp much meaning beyond that. There are also plaques in 22 languages. I don’t remember what they say. But at the English one, someone had placed five votive candles. Only one was still burning. I crouched, ignoring that I was blocking the view of a bunch of strangers, and pulled a box of matches I’d swiped from a bar out of my purse, and relit the four votives not burning. I wish I could have done more.

Off to the side of the memorial lie the ruins of the gas chamber #2. The Nazis blew it up when the Soviets started closing in, and all that remain are the underground foundations and two sets of slumped over floors. Though I knew what they were, they were… beautiful. God, I feel awful for using that word here, again, but it’s the only way I can describe them. The stone is so grey it’s almost black, and its mostly covered in lichen. Small plants have taken root on the less vertical sections, and the whole thing is surrounded by trees that let the light soften as it streams down to the forest floor. It was cathartic to see nature so indifferent to the cruelty of humanity. The impermanence of everything that happened there was made real for me by the plants taking over the ruins of a mass extermination chamber. The forgiveness of the deceased I’d felt fleetingly in the crematorium maybe an hour earlier felt real – felt almost solid, like something floating in the air – looking at this place.

We saw other things – latrines, barracks, the remains of barbed wire fences – but the raw, aching torment began to fade. And in its place…

Well, it’s hard to be mad at anyone in the wake of this kind of experience. It’s hard to feel much of anything, but a big plate of pierogies, a kind Polish restaurant owner who pulls out the homemade plum vodka when he hears what you did that day, a hot shower, and roommates who just went through the same thing (though I think I might have had the most intense reaction of the four of us) will bring back a sense of normalcy.

Combined with what happened Friday and a long time on the train to think today (about ten hours), I think I have a better idea of what I feel about the Czech boy. He's not blameless, certainly, but I handled it badly. But more than that, I think this might have been my fault. I said when all of this was starting, that I wasn’t scared of letting him in. Because of that, I fell too hard, too fast, and too intensely. Whatever he might say to the contrary, I think I scared him off. Which sucks, because apparently the only two modes I have are “fuck off” and “Ermahgerd I love you so much,” and no middle ground. But that’s something I’ll have to work on. Next time. So really, next year. You know, the fact that it took heartbreak for Prague to start feeling like a real place and not some fever dream is probably very indicative of the kind of person I am. Oh well, I suppose. Best not to dwell on it.