In Mania's Memory by Lisa Birnie

Author:Lisa Birnie
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simply Read Books
Published: 2010-10-17T16:00:00+00:00

AUSCHWITZ-BIRKENAU

MAY 14, 2002

We stop at the high double gates. Sky-reaching wire fences spread out on either side and fade into a thin perspective. Our guide, Miroslaw Obstarczyk, leaps out and swings open the steel and wire, and we drive into Birkenau, the extermination section of Auschwitz.

We get out of the car. There are no other visitors; the silence is total. Permission must be had to visit these parts, and it’s not always given. A two-story-high watchtower still stands guard by the entrance gate, the swan-necked arc lights still run along the two parallel barbed-wire fences, the unpaved road in front of the huts still goes to the site of the warehouses and crematoriums, blown up near war’s end by the fleeing SS.

The natural world around us is soft and pleasant. A light breeze blows, the sun pours its warmth onto the soil, the grassy fields move in the sweet air. But there are no trees, no birdsong. The hard, empty huts look real, the softness of nature feels false. The huts stand as before, many reconstructed but they are just as they once were, line after line of nineteen in rows two deep, gravemarkers bearing witness.

The sight of them leaves me silent, not wanting to move but simply to stare, to soak in the sight of these ordinary, orderly huts. And to grasp with mind and heart the truth that these huts were once filled with ordinary women who just wanted to have a husband, create a home, raise children, swap recipes, go to the movies, take a book from the library. But instead, because the ersatz “science” of ethnicity triumphed over all divine and human values, they were systematically murdered.

I look at Mania. How can she bear it? Not all the 181 huts that were here have been preserved, but she is walking slowly down the road, looking for a specific one, her jaunty walk gone, her shoulders slightly bent. And then she stops, pulls her shawl tightly around her small body, turns, and beckons to us: Hut 14 is still standing.

Maureen walks ahead to pick the sites she wants, Neil sets up his camera, Mania stands silent at the hut door. After a while we go in. We stare at row after row of jammed double-layer bunks in rough wood planks. Mania is confused, looking around, trying to remember exactly where she and her mother had bunked. She walks between the rows once more, shaking her head hopelessly. She doesn’t want to stay. She has to get out. She can’t stand it. Outside she breathes as if she is suffocating.

After a few moments we walk through the calf-high grass to the hut behind. A plaque, partly hidden by grass, states that all children left alive after the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto were sent here.

“This can’t be right,” Mania cries, looking at the plaque in bewilderment. “What I am telling you is I never saw another child.” But there must have been children here: the dates given on the plaque cover part of her own imprisonment.

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