Hold on to the Sun

Facing Evil: Thoughts on a Visit to Auschwitz

fAcinG evil:tHouGHtS on A viSittoAuScHWitZ (eSSAY, 2006) discussions are currently underway about restoring the Auschwitz Museum, which was established on the grounds of the concentration camp two years after World War ii. i visited the museum last summer as part of a writing journey in which i followed in the footsteps of my mother.When i returned to israel after the visit, bewildered by what i had seen, i was asked to share my thoughts with the Auchwitz museum’s advisory committee. My first visit to Auschwitz was thirty years ago, alone, as a young israeli doctoral student living abroad in Paris. that was before i began to cope with the past of my mother, rina Govrin,who went on the death march fromAuschwitz to Bergen-Belsen; and it was before i began to come to terms with the short life of her son, my half-brother Marek laub, who was sent to the gas chambers at the age of eight after his father was murdered.that was back when communist Poland was largely closed off to theWestern world. in the empty, abandoned spaces of Auschwitz-Birkenau, i 213 found only a small group of Polish schoolchildren in the late autumn chill, as if time had stopped. And there, in the heart of the menacing silence of the biggest cemetery in the world, echoed the rage to shout that which lies outside the human capacity for language and imagination. dazed, i walked among the blocs of Auschwitz and across the grounds of Birkenau.And there,facing the silence of the place, i understood that i couldn’t go on denying the past, though it had seemed so easy in the tel Aviv of my childhood, or in the Paris of the 1970s. from then on, much of what i wrote was, in some way, an echo of my mother’s story. last summer, i returned as part of a “delegation of two” with rachel-Shlomit, my older daughter, who had lost her grandmother when she was a baby.it was a full twenty years after my mother’s death, but i traveled with the voices of the women who had survived alongside her and who had conveyed to me, one by one, several strands of the story she had silenced. on that summer morning, the museum was teeming with masses of visitors from all over the world, both individuals and groups, only a few from israel. this time, when we were swallowed up among those congregating at the museum exhibits, what was most apparent to me was the mighty process of erasing.then and now. Among the other tourists, who were divided into groups, we were led by a Polish guide on an official tour. 214 Facing Evil following now in my own footsteps as well, i passed through the museum exhibits for the second time in my life.As the visit progressed, i was confronted by a sense of internal paralysis.i felt the renewed shock of facing the trap of destruction—the ramp where the transports arrived straight to death, and its alternative: forced labor, starvation ,human experimentation laboratories,and only then to the gas chambers with cans of Zyklon B and the ovens.And the remains, heaps of remains: the shoes, the eyeglasses, the brushes, the hair. But at the same time, i was seized by another emptiness that grew stronger: the silence of millions of human beings who were murdered and tortured here. during the visit, they were once again swallowed up in the anonymity of mass numbers, in the facelessness of collective identity, in the deceptive glory of martyrdom. And they were swallowed, too, in the compressed piles of remains that stood as holy relics in glass display cases. Among the masses of visitors, their absence reverberated. Auschwitz is a graveyard without a grave.the nazi death factory murdered a million and a half people here, systematically wiping out their ashes and their memory.those who were murdered have left no personal traces, and even in the museum, they practically do not exist—not as human beings. not in their previous lives and not as they lived between the fences of the camp, in the blocs, the huts, the lines to death. the names of the dead or of the survivors 215 Facing Evil aren’t mentioned, and their photos are hard to find. few have voices, and most of their stories...