Excerpts From A Polish Travelogue Part III

Wednesday, July 23—It started well with a sausage McMuffin from McDonald’s and a Polish doughnut, a perfect bilateral breakfast. Then, rain. I didn’t record exactly when the rains began, but for the rest of our stay, they plagued us, dampened our clothes and spirits, and altered our schedule. Unlike the Poles, who, according to Anna, are made of sugar and melt even in light showers, we Americans absorbed our share of precipitation undaunted, but flooding in the south prevented us from going to the Zakopane and hiking Mt. Giewont. Of the repeats I would have like to execute, climbing Giewont would have been paramount, but some things are not to be. Today was Auschwitz, a dreary day—much like the day of my first visit to Oswiecim—suitable for black and white film stock.

On the way to Auschwitz, however, we made a stop at a small castle, an unrestored ruin of a country stronghold of the bishops of Krakow. A side-trip new to me, the Zamek Lipowiec offered lovely views and a memorable highlight. While not the Zakopane, the castle elevated us and took our breath away. High on a hill surrounded by a wood, the castle’s approach has a decidedly fairy-tale look, and yet altogether natural. I love the forest landscape in the Old World, how clean it is kept, the brush cleared and the trees pruned for kindling, so that visibility extends to a distance—one can see wicked witches and predatory beasts half a mile off. Walls so thick of rough-hewn stone and brick, you’d think that these were not so much rooms constructed as caves, hollows, or pockets of air structurally permitted by the orderly piling up of masonry. These were forts, prisons, redoubts, refuges, not royal villas; a modern basement provides more amenities, but has much less atmosphere. And we climbed up into that, atmosphere, spiraling tightly into oxygen debt, the abounding silence of life far below, the Wisla flowing, autos trundling, cemeteries resting in peace, and falcons, below us, diving into the tree-tops below them. With only the sound of the wind. Mounting a castle tower or a mountain is the medieval equivalent of flight.(128-150)

Auschwitz, again, failed to move me, though Birkenau succeeded as before in evoking something of a sense of melancholy and a little of mystery. I do not know why this most awful of places weighs so little upon my psyche. Perhaps, as Arendt has argued, the banality of this particular evil, affects our memory of it. Perhaps it requires reenactors, Nazis recruited from the White Supremacy movement. Perhaps we should be sorted at the entrance, separated from our families, some sent immediately to the gas chambers, others to work. Perhaps our material goods should be confiscated, pilfered. Perhaps we should be physically abused. Perhaps we should be made to fear, not to reflect. Movies do a better job of recreating the horror; the static site itself preserves only the banality, a banality not without occasional pathos or arresting imagery, but nothing like the place it should be, the sickening blow it should deliver. Perhaps my soul has been deadened, and I refuse to feel the way people—even good people—want me to feel. I did appreciate the prison photographs of the seized and the murdered, which I had not seen before. They personalized the horror, and their eyes communicate all the individuality of response to their plight, from boredom and despair, to impending hysteria. The cafeteria was quite good, and shouldn’t be there at all.(151-155)



Steady rain shortened our stay at Birkenau, a more open camp site, and compelled us to our cars and a return to Krakow. We mistook a turn and traveled most of the way back behind a truck loaded with poultry, encountered a traffic jam of the sort that makes me curse Chicago, dropped Anna off, and succeeded, at Erin’s direction, in finding our way back to the hostel. We dined at Restaurcja Nostalgia, I the potato placki. I defeated Alex again in chess, pretty much by accident. We know the proper movements of the pieces, but nothing of strategy—armies that clash in the night.