The Auschwitz gate inscription reads 'Arbeit Macht Frei', 'Work Makes [you] free.' This deceptive statement contains within it a subservise message from the prisoners who created it. Note that the 'B' in 'Arbeit' is upside down. See the excerpt below from an article on the website of the International Auschwitz Committee:
"The inscription was a cynical lie, as all the prisoners knew and physically experienced day in day out. But what most of them didn’t realize was that the sign contained a subversive message: the survivor Tadeusz Szymanski told of a conversation he had some years after the liberation with another survivor who had been forced to work in the camp locksmith’s workshop. As he accompanied Mr Szymanski beneath the gate, he told him that when he and his camp comrades were ordered by the SS to weld the sign together, they had deliberately placed the ‘B’ in the word ‘Arbeit’ upside down. It was a sign of self-esteem and self-assertion in an environment where all vestiges of human rights had been eradicated."
The sense of 'self-assertion' in the face of enslavement and genocide gives me some strength. Since the tour began to take shape, visiting Auschwitz has been a source of discomfort, fear, and mystery for me. It is not a site like other historical sites, even battlefields, where I have visited in the past. Omaha Beach, for example, and its accompanying cemetery of white stone grave markers was the product of a war of liberation. Auschwitz was a place of merciless inhumanity and destruction of innocent, non-combatant life. A Jewish man who once visited Auschwitz told me he could not bring himself to take pictures at the camp. Something made it uncomfortable to record images of the place, as though the act of photography there was sacrilegious. The wife of an Auschwitz survivor shared that when she and her survivor husband visited the camp he felt a sense of pride and strength to be able to walk in and out of the camp as a free man. There is such an interesting range of reactions to the camp.
Elie Wiesel tells the story of 2 Hasidic Rabbis who stopped for the night in Oswiecem/Auschwitz, Poland, some 100 or more years before World War 2. In the darkness of the night there they felt afraid and unnerved. They had to move on.
Given the range of reactions to the camp, what does it mean for me, for our tour to visit Auschwitz-Birkenau? How do we approach this site? What should our 'kavannah' or spiritual intention be when we go there? How can we best support one another through the likely emotional roller coaster of visiting this site?
Part of the answer for me is that I want to have a first hand experience of a place that I have only heard about from survivors, read about in books, and 'seen' through the eyes of an amateur camera or Hollywood filmmakers. It is important for me to be able to describe the 'feeling' of the place to my family, to my community, and to my students who are living in a world in which the number of Holocaust survivors who can tell their stories is decreasing. The day will come when no living survivors can tell their stories to audiences, when we will have to depend on video and second hand material.
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