Before I begin this entry, I'd like to explain to people that I cry on average about ten times during any holocaust movie. So when we were visiting Auschwitz today, I was actually worried about whether I would be making some sort of scene. I wanted it to feel real. I don't want to be posting a fucking review, but it's the only fitting response. I wanted the human cost to blind and deafen me, but instead I just felt more angry and disconnected.
So the first problem with Auschwitz is that it is a museum. A museum run by maniacs with human hair behind glass cases, and with dead people (including a couple of Mendels) staring out from pictures on the walls. Either make a Holocaust museum in Warsaw, or just retain the site as it was: any combination of the two will just end up in poor taste. It doesn't feel like a place where people died but a place full of signs telling you where people died.
The second problem with Auschwitz is that it has restaurants and several gift shops. Even the toilets cost a zloty to use. If you're comfortable with this, then skip this paragraph. If you're not, consider the question: what really is the difference between buying an Auschwitz DVD and an Auschwitz T-shirt or gift mug? It's more superficial than you think, and the money ain't going anywhere charitable. Also, hands up who likes the idea of buying a hamburger and shake within a hundred metres of a camp where thousands died of hunger?
The third problem with Auschwitz is the crowds. There are signs saying no smoking, no photography, and pleading silence in the spots where a few hundred thousand lost their lives. Does this faze the average tourist on his package tour? Today, I saw constant flash photography, smoking, a lot of laughter and even a kissing couple. Chances are, that if you're in a death camp laughing and hugging your girlfriend, the place just isn't reaching you.
And at what point does it all become a sort of voyeurism? People were going around saying "have you been to the crematorium yet?" like they were fucking Alton Towers rides. The whole experience is being taken up as "one of the things you simply MUST do once" along with seeing the Tower of Pisa. I heard someone in the street go, "I visited Auschwitz today" and her friend went "how did you like it?" and she went "it was fabulous ... (then hastily) terrible, of course".
Listen: consider the London Dungeon ride. Once people were tortured to death in there, now it's a fucking theme park. When the last survivors have died, when Anne Frank's diary becomes a bit of prescribed school literature like Macbeth, then there will be nothing real or true about the Holocaust any more and all that will remain is the polite indifferent faces of the crowds who will recommend the experience to their friends because it says "what humans are capable of", walking through the gum-chewing masses not realising that therein lies just as damning an evidence.
I searched for something real amongst the reconstructed bunk beds and the explanatory diagrams, and I found it as I entered the gas chamber. I suddenly realised that the little antechamber before the main part made all noises incredibly loud, and noticed that the shuffling of our feet for a second became deafening. The sudden experience faded as soon as it had came, and I was left looking at the pieces of graffiti ("XXXX, 2009") between the nail-marks on the walls. I want Auschwitz abandoned to nature, seen only by a few who beat a path through the overgrowth to silently weep, and that alone.
