The Museum of Hell

This is part five of a six-part series. Read the other installments here.

Needing a break from my comrades I latch on to another tour group at Auschwitz and hear the guide explain that a thousand people squeezed into a room for 200. I recall the late Auschwitz survivor Tadeusz Borowski, in his short story "This Way to the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen," talking about the nightmare within a nightmare of being in a lower bunk, under an inmate with typhus. You know, because of the dripping. He also talked about the stench.

But today there is no stench. The site is immaculate. And I realize that without the stench, without mud, this isn't hell. This is the Museum of Hell.

Somehow I've left the barracks and wandered downfield to the railroad siding where a lone period boxcar sits on the track. "The selection!" I hear myself cry. I'm standing on the spot where notorious Auschwitz physicist Dr. Mengele—or whomever was god that day—made his selections while an orchestra of inmate musicians played waltzes nearby.

Survivors recall that Mengele sniffed at the flower in his lapel as he decided the fate of new arrivals. Thumb to the right, the gas and chimney. To the left, hard labor. Fast unspeakably horrible death or slow unspeakably horrible death.
It doesn't matter how iconic the scene is, that it's been rendered in a thousand movies, described in books and documentaries into numbing cliché. As I said earlier, when you're actually standing there, on that ground, all preconceived notions you had about the place are erased. I hear myself, stealing a line from DeNiro in The Deer Hunter, saying aloud: "This is this." I keep my eyes on the ground my entire time at the camp, like a crack addict looking for crumbs. I don't know what I'm looking for. It's just… this earth, this dirt. Where the dead once marched. I bend down, pick up rocks, fill my pockets.

As I stagger off I'm struck by a strange sensation that the eyes of the murdered are staring up from beneath me, neither judging nor complaining. I crash past a clan of red-faced white people sitting on the ground, as if besotted by emotion, and head to the long courtyard between the infamous Blocks Ten and 11.

From the outside these two long buildings, facing each other across a well-maintained walkway and courtyard, might be smallish Greenwich Village brownstones. As you approach the far end of the courtyard, however, a sign urges quiet and noise fades. This is the Wall of Death, before which condemned prisoners—and by prisoners I mean men, women, babies in their mothers' arms—were paraded naked from the adjacent "dressing room" and shot in the neck. Bouquets have been placed on the ground. Pebbles in the cracks. A guide explains that when business was brisk the SS used air pistols to spare the tender ears of the professionals inside the buildings.

Block Ten was Experimentation and Sterilization. This is where, among other things, Dr. Mengele busied himself sewing twins together, injecting dwarf children with gangrene, sterilizing legions of inmates by having them sit on irradiated benches. The usual.

Block 11 was the Torture Building. Over the door a small sign is still visible: BLOK SMIERCI. "Death Block." A rare case of non-euphemistic Nazi-speak. Block 11 was a nest of torture chambers within the open-air torture of the camp itself. Visitors walk down a narrow corridor, peering into each specially designed hellhole. The Suffocation Cell: custom made so occupants slowly use up the oxygen. Some guards would light candles and put them inside for the prisoners. The candles were not to illuminate but to suck up oxygen, speed asphyxiation. For inmates caught trying to escape there were the starvation cells, where victims were basically left to die—slowly—with no food or water.

Walk down the hall to the next door. Peer into the Standing Room, a three-square-foot box in which prisoners could do nothing but stand. "I had an apartment like that in college!" yucks Timmy the Memphis jokester.

A woman in a hijab and her partner move quickly away from Timmy, as do what look to be a family of Norwegians, blonde blue-eyed types right out of Hitler's master race catalogue. I follow them out of the hallway and into a stairwell, where a throng of stunned-looking visitors make their way up the stairs.

No more cells. Now we're facing actual displays of actual items recovered when the Allies liberated the place. Call it an eloquent frenzy of objects: a mountain of suitcases, countless tangled eyeglasses, discarded artificial limbs piled behind the glass. (Among their other issues, it seems the Nazis had serious hoarding problems.) And then I spot it, the most startling thing I've ever seen: the hair. A swollen, unspeakable, unimaginable mass of human hair. Two tons, according to the plaque. Shorn from the newly dead by the sonderkommandos, Jews whose job it was, for extra food or cigarettes, to drag the freshly gassed corpses from the chamber and wrench the gold teeth from their mouths and shave their heads. Said hair, tainted with Zyklon B, was sent off to be turned into carpets, cloth, or delicate fibers for detonating bombs. The ashes, gathered in heaps, served to fertilize the Commandant's garden, the Germans being early recyclers.

I suddenly realize that I have not swallowed, barely breathed, since coming face to face with this room-filling human hairball.

Stumbling blindly outside—I don't know if my vision's blurred from grief or disbelief—I gulp for air and follow an Aussie I know from my group. For some reason, I keep repeating in my head, This is sanctified ground… This is sanctified ground…

Except maybe for the cafeteria, which I have somehow found myself in front of. Is Auschwitz Vegan? Hitler was famously vegetarian—not counting the Bulgarian fecal matter his personal physician, Dr. Morell, would supposedly mix in with his injections of morphine and methedrine. But that's not really eating…

Watching the mysteriously (to me) peckish visitors pour into the outdoor snack bar, I find myself just standing there, in the little road out front, staring with some grim amalgam of shock, revulsion, and genuine disbelief. Sensing my dismay, an old school gentlemen in a Homburg hat and suit, no small touch in 80-plus weather, steps beside me and stares at the death campers shoving pizza and chicken legs into their faces.

We stare together for what feels like a long time, or might have been seconds. Without looking at me he begins to speak, in an accent that may be Dutch, or Finnish, or even Icelandic. "You know, people assume the visitors' center—the souvenir shop, café, toilets—was built after the place was re-opened for tourism. The truth is, that building was put up in the early 40s. The spot where they're eating is where prisoners were tattooed and disinfected, where their heads were shaved. Their first traumatic entry into hell. Now commemorated by tourists munching pizza."

My new friend ambles off before introducing himself, merely stopping as he goes to add, "Look it up."

For minutes afterward, I can't take my eyes off the cafeteria. People, there's no way around it, are really chowing down. What is it about genocide that gives these folks such a hearty appetite? At what point will some savvy marketer take a page from showbiz joints like the Carnegie Deli, or Canters in LA, and offer sandwiches named for stars? Canters has the Jerry Lewis and Jack Benny. Why can't Auschwitz claim Eli Wiesel? Primo Levi Pastrami-on-Rye?

Who knows if that's more disrespectful than what's already on the menu—or the fact that there even is a menu?

Don't ask me. I have no appetite whatsoever, and head back to the bus.

Illustrations by Koren Shadmi