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Perhaps it’s morbid, but to me that is Birkenau. It’s not about a museum attempting to explain what happened, it’s just the camp. The buildings, such as the quarantine bunks, are as they were. It’s more telling than trying to explain what happened, it allows the visitor to see it. Above all, however, it’s a cemetery. Not just the fields or ponds of ashes, there’s the sense that it’s all hallowed ground.

Perhaps Rob Francosi said it best:

The camp is 425 acres, a mile by a mile-and-a-half, but this information offers little guidance. The Allendale campus is more than twice its size. No, it is Birkenau’s horizontal emptiness that makes it seem so much larger than it actually is. Only a few of its nearly 300 barracks still stand on the windswept and barbed-wire-enclosed plain, a field dotted with chimneys surviving like burned tree trunks after a sweeping fire. A space once crammed with 100,000 prisoners now stands deserted, except for small groups of mostly silent tourists.

The silence was what I preferred. Since I headed to Birkenau when it was getting crowded at Auschwitz, I had Birkenau primarily to myself. There were a few tour groups, but I escaped them by walking counter-clockwise through the compound. There were still plenty of signs to follow, and I could think. I’m very glad that I didn’t book a tour as I would have felt rushed and I didn’t want anyone else’s interpretation. I wanted to take it in and try to put it together on my own.

At the entrance to the camp there’s a sign that tries to explain what happened and the fact that it’s listed with UNESCO, but is it necessary. Presumably anyone who’s made the effort to travel to the camps, since they’re not particularly on the way to anywhere, knows what happened. I’d be satisfied with a sign that said something along the lines of “Respect…Learn.” Since above all, that’s what visitors need to do. Learn, in whatever means works best for you. I suppose that’s why it’s good they have the preserved aspects of Birkenau and the ‘tell the story’ aspects of Auschwitz, each might appeal to a different visitor.

I saw many people walking around with guidebooks, but I preferred to go without it. I’d have been lost without my map of the camps, but I didn’t want to read, I wanted to observe.

One of the areas that spoke the loudest was Median Road/Selection Road. This was a right turn off the ‘main road’ (where the tracks are) and you walked in the footsteps of those who were ‘selected.’ Those who were headed straight to the crematoria. It’s a little, but it really made me think. The road really was that empty. And eerily quiet. From there the remains of the camp’s buildings were clear. In an apparent attempt to cover up/hide their actions, the Nazis tried to destroy most of the camps before liberation. It was on this road (and also at the sauna, which I didn’t get a good photo of) where I really heard Elie Wiesel’s Night. Perhaps heard is the wrong word as I hadn’t yet read the book, but when I read the book later while waiting for the train, I was back in that spot.

Making a left turn at the end of the road, I headed back to the crematoria. You reach a fork: to the left, a pond. To the right, the remains of Crematorium V. Of course a pond is never just a pond. It’s also a cemetery. If it’s not enough that they burned and gased these people, but then they threw their remains in a pond. However I was pleased that this pond was alive: tadpoles, fish and frogs. It made me happy that there was a sign of life there, however the flowers that grew near the rail lines bothered me. Tamara said it well when I spoke to her this morning, “It’s almost how dare the flowers grow.” In Hiroshima and Nagasaki, two other examples of historical pilgrimages, people thought flowers wouldn’t grow, but they did. There it was a sign of new life, here it was just wrong, with one exception.

The exception was related to, but not at the site, of Crematorium V. The other flowers were at the site of Crematorium IV where the Sonderkommando revolted and destroyed it in October 1944. In that case, it seemed almost as if the flowers were saying, “Your death had a purpose.” As for how that was related to Crematorium V: the ‘tour guide’ there was a surviving Sonderkommando. Wow! It was one of the best tours I ever had the pleasure of eavesdropping on. Made me wish my German was better, but I got the gist of it. Some were really listening, but some clearly weren’t. That’s sad. A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. They courteously didn’t mind my eavesdropping.

From Crematorium V, I veered left past the sauna and remains of Crematorium IV to the international monument to the victims, one of the only things to be added to the camp. The monument was simple, a sculpture with that plaque translated into many languages. From there, you could look down the length of the rail to the Death House, said to be the emblem of Birkenau. I disagree, to me the rails say more. That’s how they all came.