Written by 〡 Ye Kefei
I have written many articles about visits to Auschwitz, but I have always been unable to find a way out of the depression of the visits. The misery of human history still remains in a concentration camp surrounded by barbed wire. The spirit of slaughter that has not dissipated for decades still creates shadows even under the brilliant sun. Perhaps because of this, I rarely describe the details of the concentration camp.
Auschwitz was not an isolated individual, but the collective name for the 42 concentration camps surrounding the small town of Auschwitz, which hemler ordered on 27 April 1940. On January 27, 1945, the concentration camp was liberated. In 1947, Poland converted Auschwitz into a museum, and in 1979 it was listed as a World Heritage Site.
In the Pulitzer Prize-winning middle school essay "Nothing News from Auschwitz," the author writes:
"This is perhaps the most terrifying tourist center in the world. The purpose of people is different - some people want to see for themselves whether things are as terrible as they say, some people want to make themselves forget the past, and some people want to pay tribute to the victims by visiting the places where the victims are tortured. ”
So, what am I here for? Maybe both. Perhaps, as a writer, even as an amateur, I have, as the article says, a sense of mission that "must be written," and "this sense of mission comes from an uneasy mood."
As I lined up to get in, I noticed the staff in charge of maintaining order and selling tickets, all of whom were young people. Before 1990, the people in charge and most of the staff were survivors of the camps. With the passage of time, the survivors of that year have gradually withered away, but fortunately the concentration camp is still being repaired and maintained to show the world, and history will not be annihilated.
Although in the eyes of many, the camp has lost its original appearance, "people can only see a concentration camp that was artificially reconstructed on the original site" in the end. But this is perhaps one of the most important ways to preserve the imprint of history, because you can't make the ruins of the ruins take on the mission of a museum.
Walking into the camp, on the iron gate at the entrance was the widely circulated slogan: "Labor is free", of course, in the concentration camp, this is a lie. Long barbed wire fenced the camp, separated from the camp trail by a three-meter-wide sandy field, where prisoners could walk, but the sand was already off-limits. If you step into the sand, it is considered to be an intentional escape, and the soldiers in the guard booth will not hesitate to shoot. Today, you can still see the old wooden plaque with the word stop written on it plus a skull. In front of a bungalow there is a simple wooden frame, three vertical and one horizontal, more than two meters high, and the wood is smoothed by the years.
How many people were hanged on this gallows that year? Will there be corpses hanging every night?
One survivor of the first concentration camp recalls that when he first entered the camp, there were only twenty dilapidated brick buildings, which were originally dormitories for Polish soldiers. Their job was to expand the area of the camp, and the time of the day was filled with labor, and eventually they could not escape death. The guard once said:
"The place you've come to is not a sanatorium, it's a German concentration camp. Being burned in a crematorium and then turning into a wisp of green smoke and drifting out of the chimney is your only exit from here. ”
The two-story red brick cell that can be seen today looks like a school dormitory, and the blue sky and green trees outside the building are quite beautiful. But this was not the case, the prisoners were crammed into a crowded, tattered barracks, a box-shaped cell of a few square meters would be crammed into dozens of people, in 1942, a female prison that originally accommodated dozens of people was actually crammed into 1700 people! Most people die of starvation, exertion and disease. There were doctors in the camps, but they did not treat the sick and save people, but instead did live medical experiments on prisoners, such as experimenting with convenient sterilization methods and performing vivisection of twin children.
As I weaved through the different themed memorials in each building, the walls of the corridors were filled with photographs of the camp victims, with their births and deaths indicated below. Many were very young, as well as a sixteen-year-old twin sister who was born on October 4, 1927, and died together on July 23, 1943.
In addition to the headshots of the camp, there is a wall full of pictures of the arms of the prisoners. Each prisoner was given a number, but this number was not sewn on clothes, but burned directly on the arm, even for newborn babies. In the eyes of the Nazi guards, these prisoners were not even as good as animals. In concentration camps, every day is a long humiliation.
Nazi guards would repeat useless labor for prisoners, such as having them stand in a circle under the scorching sun, each with a sand pile in front of them, and then shoveling the sand pile in front of them to the right like a drum, endlessly. Another example is having the prisoners carry the stones from one end to the other in the camp and then back to their original positions.
In one of the exhibition rooms, I saw nude photographs of many prisoners. Two adult women sitting on the examination bed, with protruding ribs, slender limbs, and dry breasts, no longer feminine, the instructions below tell me that they weigh only thirty kilograms in the photo. Several children stood in a row, their legs as thin as bamboo poles, their knees appeared incomparably huge, and their ribs protruded one by one.
But that wasn't the most terrible thing to do, because I knew that even if these prisoners were skinny, when they died, the Nazis would still scrape off what little fat they had and use it to make soap. Tattooists are even skinned and used to make lampshades. Even if the body is stuffed into an incinerator, the ashes are exhumed and sent back to Germany as fertilizer.
Building 11 of the camp, known as the Death Building, has a prison underground and an "advisory court" on the ground floor where death sentences are handed down. The courtyard between Buildings 11 and 10 has erected a wall, the Death Row Wall, and those sentenced to death are immediately sent to this wall for execution.
Just in front of this wall of death, thousands of prisoners were shot. Nowadays, tourists stop here, flowers are placed under the walls, and tourists substitute drinks for wine to commemorate the occasion. Among the dozens of buildings in the camp, glass windows were standard, except for the 11th and 10th sides facing the death wall, and wooden baffles were added to the glass windows, which also made the courtyard extremely gloomy. If this is to cover up sin, it is really a cover-up.
The most shocking thing is undoubtedly the mountain of hair, shoes and other items. Even with protective measures, the years still leave traces on these old objects, which crack, discolor, and clutter. You can't know who the owner of each item is, or whether they live or die, only that it's not easy to survive.
Those men's shoes, women's shoes, children's shoes, and even baby shoes, a total of 110,000 pairs. One figure is even more striking: when Auschwitz was liberated, 404,000 pairs of shoes remained in the warehouse. In addition, we can see mountains of tableware, dental gear, razors, shoe polish, glasses and suitcases with names on them, which can no longer find their owners. Of course, there are also used gas canisters, empty cans piled up in the exhibition room, and no one can calculate how many people have been killed by the gas in these jars.
Initially, most of the Jews escorted to the camps remained convinced that they were simply "migrating" to Eastern Europe, and even believed that the Germans had purchased land and farms for them, so they carried a large number of personal belongings.
After entering the camp, their belongings were confiscated and "kept" until they died, not knowing that they would become war materials. At that time, their belongings were sorted and hoarded and shipped out for use by the armies and civilians of the Third Reich. Until the end of the war, there were still mountains of items in the camp's warehouses that could be transported away. At that time, the hair warehouse was the size of a medium-sized hangar and stored 7,000 kilograms of hair.
These hairs were mainly used to weave blankets, and to this day, the concentration camp exhibition room still contains a large number of blankets woven from human hair. The hair on display is also piled up and thrilling, because the years are too long, they are curled and entangled, and they can no longer make out the colors of the year.
In addition to buildings and these objects, another way of recording history is writing. Simon Wiesenthal concludes his book The Executioner Is Among Us that the SS often admonished prisoners:
"No matter how this war ends, we have won the war against you. None of you will survive to testify, and even if anyone survives, the world will not believe him... We will destroy all the evidence, along with you... The history of the concentration camps will be written by us. ”
That's only half true. Although the victims can only be silent and cannot indict the nazi crimes, the living will still record and reflect. After World War II, the crimes of the concentration camps were repeatedly exposed, and the memories wrote history together with the barracks and crematoria of the concentration camps.
You can't imagine what kind of memories humans would eventually have if even the real words were erased, and even reflection was not allowed.