In 1948, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill famously paraphrased George Santayana, “those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it.” Recently we learned that something like 30% of young people in Europe do not know that millions of people were systema-tically killed by Nazi Germany in death camps in what know as “the Holocaust.” In our 1974 trip to Auschwitz, my family gave me the trip of a lifetime and a gift of never forgetting.
In Part I: The Journey I cover our family trip to Auschwitz by rail and ocean liner to Poland in 1974. We disembarked in the port of Gdynia, Poland, a family of five–three children ages 5, 9 and 12–in the dead of winter lugging 6 months’ worth of belongings. Poland at this time is a tightly controlled Soviet bloc country. It is very unusual for them to have tourists period, let alone from the United States. No one speaks English. My father gets by in German. As you’ll recall, some 30 years prior German came in handy with the Nazi occupation. It is somehow made clear to us that upon our leaving the country every single dollar that we bring in will have to be accounted for. We will have to prove that we spent each dollar in a state-sanctioned institution, and not in the thriving black market economy. We need to exchange our dollars for the Polish “złotys” (ooh, that was fun, have never had to use that crossed out “L” before as a character) and then spend them in the right places.
Our mother, never particularly chill, is understandably quite worried about the logistics and the money. My father has made exactly no prior arrangements for travel or accommodations–based on his expertise “bumming it” through western Europe in 1954 by himself. Our mother points out approximately hourly that there may be a difference between a 23 year old man traveling solo with a backpack and a sleeping bag through western Europe and a family of five traveling through the Soviet bloc with about 15 suitcases. Our father shrugs this off and says, “honey, don’t worry. It will all work out.”
Everywhere we go between Gdynia, Gydansk (aka Danzig), Krakow, and Birkenau (which is where the Auschwitz-Birkenau Camp is) people sidle up to us and whisper “dollars for złotys.” This is the sum total of the English they know. Our father, the uniquely American “cowboy socialist” (my coinage as far as I know) loves breaking the rules and finding a shortcut almost as much as he loves a good safety net. Every single time they say “dollars for złotys,” he rifles through his wallet and considers it and every single time our mother angrily whispers “no way, don’t you dare!”
When we get to Birkenau, ready to visit Papa’s idea of a family field trip, a crumbling death camp that has not yet been turned into a museum, we learn that there are no state-sanctioned accommodations in the town. None. Zippo. Zero. Not that they’re booked, that they don’t exist. So here we are, a family of five, there is not another train out of town until tomorrow, there are no state sanctioned places to spend the local currency. What’s a socialist cowboy to do? Pa’s face lights up–why dollars for złotys, of course!
Easily my father parlays our dollars into a room for the night in a local home. In this home there is already a family of 4 living in one room. They give us their sleeping quarters behind a curtain happy to bed down with blankets on the floor in exchange for $10 which represents a month’s wages in black market exchange. They feed us from their table, I remember it as cabbage, potato and sausages. Maybe that’s just because all Polish food seems to be cabbage, potato and sausages.
In the morning we awoke to embark on a day in the camp. I remember the town being very small and the camp being very large, by far the largest thing in the area. In addition to all the other things that are chilling about a death camp, it is icky to all picture the boost to the local economy this vast death machine must have been. I don’t remember a guide of any kind other than our father, although I believe he did ask around and try to get someone to walk us around, maybe someone did and Pa translated from German.
It felt like the whole town retained a literal stench of death from the camps. The air was thick with it. Our father narrated for us all, even Evan, a kid who scared easily, how the trainloads of men, women and children would have come in. They would have been separated and deloused. The healthier ones were put to work and the weaker ones sent to huge “bath houses” and gassed to death.
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| the “bath” house |
I remember walking around the “bath houses” and my father describing how the gas would come down out of the “showers” and people would die in one mass. I remember walking outside and my father describing how people would be buried in mass graves. I remember him telling me that it was estimated that over a million people died in Auschwitz (which by the way had several campuses separated by a few miles from each other).
Our father, I should add, was generally a light-hearted genial man who loved to make jokes and play games. He wasn’t some grim shove your face in reality person all the time. But, at least for me, this was by no means the first time I was being put through an unvarnished education on human cruelty. From the time I was six or seven I could remember seeing the pictures of children napalmed by American soldiers in the Vietnam war, falling to sleep to the strains of Joan Baez singing “no more genocide in my name.”
My brief internet research here yields a reminder that it is a misnomer to call Auschwitz a “concentration camp,” it’s actually a death camp. There were other camps in the Nazi operation that were designed to hold undesirables close together alive and working–immigrants, gays, communists, political prisoners. But as “the Final Solution” was adopted, some camps, ideally situated near rail lines for easy transport of huge number of humans, were set us as “death camps”–Auschwitz was the largest of those.
As disturbing and non-fun as this trip was, I am very grateful for it. First, in the way my grandfather-in-law Sam Magavern used to say, “at the end of one’s life, it is the rough spots and vicissitudes which one remembers most fondly.” This is true of the journey on the whole, and emotional impressions of the camp. All of it was so different, and so difficult (relative to the ease of my normal life), that I remember it in great detail, unlike so many easier more pleasant trips.
Secondly, and more importantly, I am grateful that at a young age I learned about some of the greatest atrocities that humanity has committed. As difficult as these experiences were, particularly the visit to Auschwitz, they infused me with a strong moral compass for social justice, equality and an understanding of the true cost of racism. 
You’ll want to know what we went through as we left Poland and passed into what was then the country of Czechoslovakia (on the way to Prague). Customs officials looked over our paperwork, rifled through our luggage and seized the only weapon they were carrying, with a fierce look on their face, they pointed my brother’s Star Trek disc gun at us and said “ha ha, bang bang, cowboy, who shot JR?” as relief flooded our bodies. Evidently, we were headed back to the west.*
*Note, don’t try carrying this gun if you’re African-American.