In my time here, I have been thinking a lot about contradiction. This is not especially new. As an English teacher, the idea of “contrast” is the core of what we do in the classroom. It’s the same for me personally (perhaps being a human being is not so far removed from being a teacher? But I digress). Contrast emphasizes, it creates meaning. A thing is one thing because it is not another thing, right?
This is all mostly good, right? Life moves on and all that, but I’ve been feeling very stuck on this thought process. The contrast between what happened somewhere once and what is happening somewhere now can be bewildering. I felt a little silly for
being surprised, for example, at how closely the vibrant city of Lublin has crept up to the fields and fences of Majdanek. My initial thought was a kind of muted revulsion; how can people just live… right there? I wondered that earlier in the week too, when we looked at the remnants of the Warsaw Ghetto Walls, which seemed to generally be located in the neat courtyards of well-cared for apartment buildings. If I lived here—a very different version of myself, anyway, one I cannot imagine and would not necessarily like to meet—would I have my morning coffee on my balcony and water the flowers and ignore what must be regular processions of somber visitors and their tour guides in my courtyard? Would I be annoyed? Intrigued? Completely disinterested?
But maybe however imaginary me would respond is okay. To borrow an otherwise unrelated and possibly inappropriate quote from Jurassic Park: “life finds a way.” For me, it’s easier to face that contrast—between the various horrors of the Holocaust and the life that nevertheless insists on finding a way around and on top of it—through the natural world. The emptiness of Treblinka makes sense. It is full of an absent presence and it is loud. It moved me in a way I did not anticipate and to see those flowers and trees and greenery in what was once a place of unimaginable death feels right to me, somehow. Heartbreaking, but right.
So that’s another contrast, then, between how nature reclaims a place and how humanity does. This was my second time visiting Auschwitz and Auschwitz-Birkenau and even then, almost twenty years ago, I remember feeling uneasy about how memory and memorialization coexist with, well, tourism. I don’t know how we should do this, what the right way is to “do memory,” but the contrast between the smell of ice cream and the sight of the railroad leading deep into Birkenau is perhaps too much for me. I accept the need for a tour bus parking lot, for nearby restaurants, for a museum book shop (though I remain unconvinced about the concept of Auschwitz branded magnets or other souvenirs), for the selling of water, but beyond that, it’s hard not to feel a little unmoored by the contrasts.’
And then, because I can never just leave it all well enough alone, I wonder if that absurdity, the dizziness of the juxtaposition, has its own role to play in commemoration. What happened was unimaginable, except it happened. It was absolutely absurd and
irrational, except it was carried out with intention and efficiency. None of it makes any sense. But once we dig deep enough, unwrap all that history and human psychology, well, perhaps it kind of does. After writing and reflecting, I don’t know that I’ve managed to convince myself to accept the contrasts that seem most painful to me, but it is the only way I can process them at the moment. Here are the railroad tracks. There’s the ice cream stand. And everywhere, the flowers grow.