In preparing for this trip, I braced myself for the complex cocktail of experience that I imagined would come with entering a concentration camp: the incomprehensibility of humanity’s ability to divorce from humanness, the fear of anti-Semitic hate so fully expressed, the sadness at the potentials for life denied by this perversion of the natural universe’s flow. All of that was, in fact, experienced at a high degree of intensity – at times it felt impossible to fully escape, leaving behind an ugly smear on my being that only time and distance has helped me begin to shed.
However, it was the unexpected moments that have remained most resonant a week out from this study seminar’s conclusion. Turns out no amount of Holocaust education as a young Jewish person could help me fully anticipate entering spaces saturated with Naziism, and it was indeed the spaces themselves – as opposed to the actions takenwithin the space – that resonated in ways both destabilizing and grounding. The physical structures erected or commandeered by the Nazis as offices, barracks, ovens, and gas chambers. The natural structures permeating and surrounding the camps, providing the sharpest of juxtapositions between what should be and what was. The spiritual structures retaining harsh echoes unfelt and untouched but sensed on a visceral level throughout, an ever constant buzz in the body that suggested something remained amiss and that no amount of liberation could every fully cleanse. One of my longest pauses was in Auschwitz watching a grounds employee sweeping the steps to a building. This building, we found, held exhibits about the various objects harvested from Jewish bodies (hair, shoes, eyeglasses) and the profile pictures taken of prisoners as part of the Nazis careful accounting of who they killed. I felt confusion watching this man make more presentable a space that bore witness, housed, and now preserved human atrocities.
What does it say about such a space when we beautify it and make it more accessible for those guests who are already struggling? Does creating easier spiritual access through visual curating cheapen the trauma and tragedy of those who were made to suffer there? Does such preservation, rather than spotlighting anti-Semitic violence, paradoxically sustain it instead, unwittingly creating a permanent monument to its legacy as opposed to an exhibition condemning it? What psychological wellness and wholeness does it cost the humans we ask to do this work on a daily basis? Even after seven days of distance and contemplation, I have no answers to these questions. Perhaps that’s the larger point, after all. There is no logic to be found in spaces that take the natural order and seek to thoroughly corrupt it through violence, manipulation, and degradation. There are no points of resolution or closure to be settled into when looking at a child’s drawing from the walls of Auschwitz depicting menorahs and dragons, showing that despite all that had been taken from them they remained Jews with active imaginations and fantasies. There is simply the impossibility of finding peace in the wake of chaos.
Yes, the grounds should be maintained so that Naziism and forthcoming authoritarian movements that would seek footing in its legacy should be seen in all its ugliness for all those who even glance in this direction. And yet no, the grounds should be incinerated into a tainted ash buried twenty feet under new soil never to be seen again lest the taint spread.
Yes, I should touch the very stones and trees that bore witness to the stories of my Ashkenazic brothers and sisters so they be remembered and so that I may better protect my Ashkenazic sons and daughters. And yet no, I should not be paying to enter
a grounds that my people were forced into so that I can engage as a voyeur able to simply leave at any point, exercising a freedom they were never offered.
Yes and no. Preserve and burn. Bear witness and walk away. In places representing such extremes, perhaps the best place to exist is in the tension between them, plucking desperately at that tension like a guitar string in search of a clarifying frequency.
The clarity of that frequency will change with each pluck, but today as I write this it tells me I should be holding myself more personally accountable for engaging with the pasts of the spaces I inhabit. What am I preserving that unwittingly protects past joys and horrors? What do I need to deeply know about my daily spaces that can help me to be a better citizen and, by extension, a better educator and clinician?
Visiting spaces where the impossible happened challenges me to consider how – and why – I am a visitor in other spaces, and how the physical, natural, and spiritual structures of those spaces can inform a better present if stop to engage, listen, and struggle. As I navigate these questions, I will be introducing the same ones to my students so that they can understand how the clinical services they are learning provide are ecological and not isolated to just that one encounter in one room. The Holocaust came about in no small part because of the dereliction of people to seek impossible answers in the face of hard questions, and its legacy is a call to action as these questions take on new forms but same functions. I anticipate the collaborative navigation of these considerations to be a continuous and vulnerable dialectic that has us not merely satisfied with knowing the past but inquisitively responsible for what is to come.