Auschwitz

At Auschwitz-Birkenau it was a hottish day by Polish standards--80+ degrees, but really it was nice, mellow weather with a light breeze to make it comfortable. The original Auschwitz camp was rather small and close to town. Birkenau was a kilometer away near farmland and much bigger. Seeing them was not terrifying as I thought it would be the night before, but it was much more confusing and depressing.

The Nazis went off the rails before they built the camps, and I still don't understand how that happened. The fact that it happened at all is the scary thing, and maybe the scariest is that humans are capable of that given the right (or rather the wrong) circumstances.

It worries me when I see the strong picking on the weak in any situation. Everyone just kept "following through" until the end. How could they do it? What was the reasoning behind scapegoating the Jews? It's absurd. No one must have questioned. But maybe they did question, and the problem was simply that the Nazis were gangster bullies with political power--very dangerous.

[There's much more to it than this. A couple of clues to what went wrong are provided by Elias Canetti in his work Crowds and Power. In it, he explains how Hitler's use of the phrase The Diktat of Versailles emphasised the disbanding of the German army by force at the end of World War I. The treaty had deprived the Germans of one of their most important social structures--the army--and Hitler kept that wound open by calling the treaty a diktat.

Later, in the same chapter, he describes how Hitler used the effects of hyperinflation in Germany to scapegoat the Jews by supplying the humiliated German people with an object to degrade. Canetti writes:

"No one ever forgets a sudden depreciation of himself, for it is too painful. Unless he can thrust it on to someone else, he carries it with him for the rest of his life...Something must be treated in such a way that it becomes worth less and less, as the unit of money did during the inflation. And this process must be continued until its object is reduced to a state of utter worthlessness."

Canetti goes on to say:

"The world is still horrified and shaken by the fact that the Germans could go so far; that they either participated in a crime of such magnitude, or connived at it, or ignored it. It might not have been possible to get them to do so if, a few years before, they had not been through an inflation during which the Mark fell to a billionth of its former value."

Crowds and Power (1984 reprint) by Elias Canetti, p. 179-188]

The Auschwitz-Birkenau trip took all day. I was glad I saw it, but I'm also glad that I never have to do that again.

I took the train home and had Hungarian Goulash for dinner which was good but very heavy and rich--a potato pancake with pork in a tomato-based sauce (probably with a lot of butter in it); a hot tea with lemon; a nice onion, pepper, leek, and chive salad; and ice cream for dessert. I over did it, but that was because I didn't eat lunch.

Afterwards, I took a slow walk around Rynek Glowny to notice details of the buildings and I got to hear the little horn song from St. Mary's Basilica up close. A small trumpet plays on the hour and gets cut off abruptly toward the end. I like hearing that little horn, and it lifted my spirits a little after the heavy Auschwitz trip.

It looks like tomorrow is my last full day in Krakow. The plan is to see St. Mary's Basilica, the Royal Cathedral, Cloth Hall and to take another walk. I'm getting a little tired of all the rambunctious 18-25 year-olds here in Krakow. Apparently Krakow is party-central because of all the bars. People stay out until 4AM yelling. It's pretty silly and quite different from Istanbul. Getting up early helps avoid a lot of that, but it gets really loud here at night.