Too sterile for tears.

By: Rimma Ayzen

Our visit to Krakow can be seen as a prelude, a subtle warning, but one that can only be acknowledged as such in hindsight.  Should we have used it to brace ourselves?  The remaining synagogues and cemeteries are faint shadows of what once was, and tour guides are left to recall the past for us.  There is a vague sense of familiarity, a stinging nostalgia.  A group of Jews walking along the streets of Kazimierz.  But we were there to briefly aim our cameras and attentions at the non-kosher Jewish style restaurants, at the Remuh synagogue and stories of the great sages buried behind it.

Then, Auschwitz and Birkenau, and numbness.  Standing in the barracks and touching the slanted bunk beds rendered any previous knowledge, emotion or experience foreign; all the books, lectures, and movies hovered aimlessly in the background.  There was no anchor for our thoughts, just overwhelming emptiness, nebulous pain.  This shouldn’t have been so ambiguous, it’s endlessly frustrating that it was.  We expected to come and to cry, but it wasn’t so easy.  Flowers grow on either side of the railroad tracks, and this, what we’re taking pictures of, is a gas chamber masquerading, if only for a moment, as a museum.  We desperately struggled to understand and internalize, to feel. 

Perhaps emotion would be inappropriate anyway, too full of life; as if the sunlight and birds weren’t enough.