Triduum in Krakow - part 2

We were up early on Good Friday in order to catch a local bus to Auschwitz. We had some difficulty deciding whether or not to visit, especially as Sarah had been before with a school group, but in the end we did. It's very hard to know how to write about it, as anything you say is inadequate. A few of my personal impressions are as follows: the feeling of how strange it was that the sun was shining, the blossom was growing in the trees and the birds were singing; the ironic words written in friendly curvy writing over the gate: Arbeit Macht Frei; the wall after wall of photographs taken of the prisoners on arrival, some with tears in their eyes, and some trying to smile; the heaps of hair, shoes, toothbrushes, suitcases and spectacles; a single broken doll among a pile of children's clothes; the unmitigated horror of Cell Block 11 - the punishment block where Maximilian Kolbe starved to death; the signs at the edge of the barbed wire saying "Halt!"; the first gas chamber to be built; the place where Rudolf Hoss, the camp commandant, was finally hanged at the end of the war.

Shuffling round with the crowd of other tourists, I felt desperately unsure as to whether or not I should be there: are we all indulging in a macabre voyeurism, or is it really important that we should have to face what other people had to live? How can you respond to the fast food vans parked around the entrance, or the souvenir shops? What about the hordes of school children who are clearly not old enough to deal maturely with what they're seeing? But what else can you do with the place? How else can the memory of the survivors be honoured? The Nazis tried to destroy Auschwitz at the end of the war, to cover up their crimes. But they didn't succeed, just as they didn't succeed in eradicating the memory of their victims. And we can't let them succeed fifty years later: these people must and will be remembered as the individuals they were, and we can't forget their sufferings just to make life easier for ourselves.

As we left the camp and caught the bus back to town, it was impossible not to feel some kind of bizarre survivor guilt, that we could just walk out and return to normal life when so many thousands couldn't. I think we both still feel deeply ambivalent about going there. I think it will take a long time for our impressions of it to fully sink in.

On arriving back in Krakow, we hurried straight to the Good Friday service which was even more poignant than usual in its starkness and bareness after being at Auschwitz. Kissing the feet of the crucifix meant more than ever, as I realised that it was not just a quaint slightly sentimental medieval tradition, but a mark of reverent compassion for all those who suffer in the world.

As you can imagine, the rest of the evening was very quiet, and we were glad to go to bed after the intensity of the day.