something that had happened, something real, something carried out with the most twisted sense of misplaced efficiency, something that made me want to be sick. Indeed when I later saw the latrines in the barracks at Birkenau (Auschwitz phase II, about a mile away), I thought I might vomit. Three long open-air rows of covered cement troughs, each containing 50 or so cut-out holes, served as toilets for the approximately 800 people who occupied the building. “Building” is too generous a word, though; the wooden barracks at Birkenau were little more than barns. I tried to imagine day-to-day life here; I couldn’t. The most efficient gassing and cremation were practiced here at Birkenau. The trains could pull conveniently close to the gas chambers and no time was wasted sending the properly “selected” prisoners to their death. The railroad tracks are still there, documenting and delineating the trail which led to so much murder.

Victor wondered, in an earlier update, about the Dachau prisoners’ ability to still appreciate beauty in such dire circumstances. There is evidence at Auschwitz that some prisoners did find strength, or joy, or hope in beautiful things: poetry, drawings and music all survived in the camps, proof that the creative spirit is one of the most difficult things to take from humans. Much thanks to our friend Judi who also noted this creative spirituality on a visit to a Holocaust memorial in D.C. and shared this thought with us in an e-mail message:  “...NOTHING stops the human spirit, the artistic spirit, the impulse to create beauty and have objects of beauty.  I wonder if any of the people who made those things, hidden in crevices in walls and found after the liberation, survived.  If they did, it may have been because of their creativity, their ability to escape the reality of an unreal situation into their mind and heart and hands. If they did not, the small pieces are evidence that they were once among us.”

More later!

Much love, ML & V