Spatial Relations on New Year's Eve in Kraków, Poland

Concentration camps

Even after all you've read & heard & seen about the Holocaust --  novels, memoirs, history, films, audio recordings...even when you are standing there in the exact spot where mass depravity occurred...even as your ears listen as a guide moves you through the barracks & killing walls & gas chambers & crematoriums...even as your eyes see photographic evidence blown up to 20' high, photos taken illegally by a Nazi guard & a prisoner who perished, his film somehow miraculously surviving to tell the story...even as you hear the sound of your feet crunching across the long, rough gravel roadways that cut through Auschwitz and Birkenau in precisely designed patterns...even as you see the legendary mountains of shoes, eyeglasses, shaving brushes, crutches & false legs, tin bowls & cups -- even with all this, the mind rebells against understanding it. The synapses of your brain short circuit. Your ears hear, your eyes see, your feet propel you forward, but your mind balks...it sits down like a stubborn mule that will not move for anything.

Only the land itself -- the physical size & reach of the death camps -- shocks you into understanding that, as Primo Levi wrote: "It happened, therefore it can happen again....it can happen anywhere."*

On a cold winter day near sunset, the camps are much quieter than the usual bustle of millions of visitors being guided through a predetermined route that precludes lingering. On a cold winter day, you take in the train tracks, the frozen ground heavy with blood, the wind whistling quietly through the ruins of buildings, the bare trees in the far distance creating a line of demarcation between "here" & "not here."

                           Auschwitz looks almost like a college campus at first

      I'm surprised the barracks are brick...it makes them seem like apartment buildings

Soon you realize that the strangely curved posts that seem kind of graceful in their design are posts for the electrified fence that surrounds every part of the camps

                    They stretch into infinity

Mountains of objects are displayed to help visitors grasp the scope of what happened. These are empty containers from the crystals used to create gas for the gas chambers.

Old, lame, & infirm prisoners met their extermination immediately, as they were deemed of no use to the forced labor of the camps.

                               Tin cups & bowls were empty most of the time

                                                     Shoe mountain

Prisoners wrote their names on their suitcases in the hope that future generations would know what happened to them.

                             One room in one of the gas chambers, called "showers"

                  Crematoriums belched smoke & the smell of burning flesh day & night

When I named my blog "Railroad Alley" I didn't think about the tracks that brought so many millions into the camps, to their deaths 

      This track at Birkenau led to the place where prisoners were unloaded & "sorted"

  Even the tracks & gravel seem made of sorrow

This is an actual Birkenau train car. A group of Jewish men are conducting a very intense service in Hebrew.

              Birkenau, as far as the eye can see

Remains of a crematorium. Nazis tried to destroy these to get rid of the evidence of what happened, but didn't have time for complete destruction.

These are the famous stalls where prisoners, stacked like cordwood, were photographed during Liberation.

                  A cold winter sunset cannot soften the impact of barbed wire

New Year's Eve

Forty-three miles away & a few hours later it's New Year's Eve in Krakow's Rynek Glowny (Grand Square). People are not as rowdy or loud as in Times Square & the countdown to midnight is more subdued. Many of the songs are slow, which seems to act as crowd control because of its mellowing effect. People are happy & celebratory, but polite, despite their large numbers.

Food carts are ready & eager for the onslaught

                           In Europe, you can never have too much meat

                                                         Or potatoes 

  It's amazing to see buildings constructed in the 13th century lit up with modern strobe lights

                    This is one of the performers, projected on a big screen

        This singer was accompanied by a bevy of dancers just like in a music video

                        These red parachutes billowed dramatically in blasts of fake wind

     There was the occasional hostel-style tourist

                                             A sense of the crowd

                                                Fireworks begin

                                               Red is a predominant color

                        This building turned pink & yellow in reflected light

                This is my favorite New Year's photo

It's past midnight & again my mind sits down like a donkey & refuses to move. On the way out of the square, there is a bottleneck because thousands of people must funnel through a narrow security turnstile. This takes time & people are packed like sardines, shuffling forward millimeter by millimeter. They are pressed against me & each other with no space between to move, barely space to breathe. It's warm in this standing mass of humanity.

Only a few hours earlier, just down the road, I stood inside a death camp gas chamber. The guide explained how, at times, the Nazis packed so many people into these "showers" that after the gas killed everyone & they opened the door again, people were still standing, dead, because there was no space to fall. It was warm inside because of the standing mass of humanity, all the bodies pressed together, not yet cooling.

Giant mind fuck.

* (Today, January 1, 2016, the copyright on Hitler's Guide To Exterminating Every Single Person I Don't Like, otherwise known as Mein Kamph, runs out & the book enters the public domain. No doubt Mein Kamph For Dummies will be out soon.)