A day in the life of Auschwitz today
December 27, 2016 4:59 PM   Subscribe

"After" is a stark and haunting short film by Polish director Lukasz Konopa In 1947, the Polish government established the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, which has since been visited by about 1.72 million people from around the world. Konopa deftly captures a setting where the horrors of the past and the activities of the present exist side by side.
posted by I_Love_Bananas (18 comments total) 19 users marked this as a favorite
 
I appreciate narration-free documentary films like this one. I've not been to Auschwitz, but this seems to confirm accounts by friends and family members who have gone because they thought they should bear witness to the site, only to run into people taking jokey selfies.

I assume they're cleaning and treating the shoes to preserve them, but also to demonstrate that "these were like yours when they got here."
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 5:38 PM on December 27, 2016 [1 favorite]


1.72 million is less than 25K visitors a year, that seems really low.

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Yep, that must be an annual visitors number; this page says more than 1.5 million visited in 2014 alone.
posted by Mitheral at 6:02 PM on December 27, 2016 [1 favorite]


Beautiful. Thank you.
posted by juice boo at 6:31 PM on December 27, 2016 [1 favorite]


Very moving. Never again. Thank you.
posted by Mr.Me at 8:24 PM on December 27, 2016 [1 favorite]


My sister and I sat on the steps of one of the barracks buildings at Auschwitz and ate our lunch. Not long after that I began to wonder if we had been inappropriate or disrespectful. It was such a peaceful, quiet place when we were there, I don't think either of us considered that.
posted by bendy at 8:27 PM on December 27, 2016


This powerfully demonstrates the behind the scene work that goes into maintaining a museum. Items have to be cared for if they are to last for future generations. It's also a monument. As a visitor, how do you acknowledge your visit? How do you bear witness? People fall back on taking pictures.

Seeing the visitors taking pictures made me think of the recent Taiwanese high school students who thought a Nazi parade was a good idea. Is Auschwitz just tourist stop #7 before going to a beer garden, castle or group lunch? And there is the pedestrian aspect of having to provide trash cans for tourists. At a former concentration and extermination camp.
posted by shoesietart at 8:31 PM on December 27, 2016 [4 favorites]


The banality
posted by esto-again at 1:40 AM on December 28, 2016 [1 favorite]


I've read just about every serious book about the Third Reich that Americans can readily get their hands on, including the unabridged Hilberg, and until I visited year before last I don't think I ever really had a sense for how compact the Auschwitz camp itself was.

The neighboring Birkenau complex — now that's where the industrialized slaughter played out at scale. That's where the railhead is, the ramp where the selections took place, the gas chambers and the endless burial pits. But Auschwitz proper is a few rows of modest brick buildings, arrayed in a cantonment two or three city blocks across at most, and if you're anything like me what you're least prepared for is the intimacy of it. Everything you've read or heard about, unless the account specified Birkenau ("Auschwitz II"), happened here, on this not particularly expansive patch of land. It's profoundly disorienting.

And, yes, the most effective aspect of the museum, for me, anyway, is the enormous vitrines filled waist-high with the everyday belongings of the people who met their end at the camp, the eyeglasses and shoes and so on. They fill entire rooms. You're told that what you're seeing isn't even a significant fraction of the museum's holdings. And then, for the first time, you begin to get a handle on what it means that a million or more human beings were murdered here.

I've written before about a pair of girl's shoes you can see, most of the way to the front of the vitrine and about three-fifths of the way down. They're still gaily pink, their leather punched with florets and whirls. And you understand that there was a little girl, and there was a day somebody bought her those shoes — had them made for her by a cobbler, bought them in a department store, gave them to her for her birthday. And there was an organized group of human beings that deliberately ripped her from her home, crammed her in a cattle car, transported her hundreds of miles across a continent at war, and immediately stuffed her into a low-ceilinged room where she choked to death on poison gas — but not before ripping her shoes from her, logging them, and throwing them on an abject heap with all the others. Once you've seen that shoe, and let its meaning sink in, I don't think you ever again feel quite the same way about the human project.

Great post and film, thanks.
posted by adamgreenfield at 4:05 AM on December 28, 2016 [28 favorites]


I lived for quite a while in Malopolska, and managed to visit Auschwitz and Birkenau a few times. What got to me after a while there was how normal the camp was. I saw plenty of old rail stock and buildings from the pre-war era, and when you think that this all happened, right here, it wasn't just the camps... my regular bus ride into Krakow took me past the old ghetto, and I spent time standing right where all this terrible stuff took place. In this town square they were rounded up, that is the quarry where they dug, Nazis once reigned from this police station.

Ghosts everywhere.
posted by Meatbomb at 6:37 AM on December 28, 2016 [6 favorites]


A horror movie.
posted by latkes at 7:33 AM on December 28, 2016


I don't understand how people can visit places like Auschwitz and laugh. I toured the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam and couldn't even speak afterwards.
posted by tommasz at 7:47 AM on December 28, 2016 [1 favorite]


It's a cemetery, crime scene, memorial, historic site, but tourists and students are going to laugh and pose and take selfies pretty much anywhere they go, especially if they don't feel closely connected to the place or the people who died there. Maybe they should reserve separate days or separate hours of the day for different kinds of visitors. Before noon, the assumption could be that people are there to mourn, to pray, to honor their dead, and the place would expect strict funeral behavior. After noon, you would bring in the field trips and tourists to rummage through the gift shop and take the look-where-I-was selfies to post on Facebook.
posted by pracowity at 9:00 AM on December 28, 2016 [2 favorites]


Thank you for posting this and thank you adamgreenfield for your thoughts.

I've also read more than one person's share of writing on the Holocaust, but I've never been to a death camp and I'm not sure that I'll ever go. Going to Germany, a place my grandfather escaped from in 1938, is fraught with ambivalence for me. Poland feels similarly fraught. Once, while driving from Amsterdam to Paris, I took a wrong turn and ended up in Germany accidentally. I couldn't leave fast enough. We'll see.
posted by Sophie1 at 10:44 AM on December 28, 2016 [1 favorite]


I went to Dachau last week, in the freezing cold. The place was filled with both tourists and teenagers on school trips, and I was surprised and relieved that every single person I saw was very, very respectful and serious about what that place was and is. I've seen people with selfie sticks at the World Trade Center site in New York and was dreading the same sort of thing, but it was not the case at all.

I'm grateful to have had the opportunity to see such a place; although Dachau was not on the same scale as Auschwitz, it was the first, and set the precedent for what the concentration camp system became. As an American right now, in December 2016, it was very very hard to read the exhaustive descriptions of what happened in the 1930s Germany without drawing direct parallels to what is happening in this country right now. It almost seemed as if the entire memorial was created explicitly as a cautionary tale - which of course it was, in a way, but not specifically aimed at what's going on in America right now. It's mind boggling that Dachau survivors and American soldiers who liberated the camp in 1945 are still alive today, yet we are here again so soon, with racist and xenophobic politicians and policies running western democracies. I'm scared.
posted by something something at 11:50 AM on December 28, 2016 [4 favorites]


It's also particularly disconcerting to take the 25 minute train ride back into Munich and step out of the subway to see masses of people enjoying the Christmas markets with gluhwein and chocolate. Just as it was in the 1930s, when the masses somehow managed to pretend for over a decade that what was happening 20 miles away had nothing to do with them or their lives.
posted by something something at 11:54 AM on December 28, 2016 [4 favorites]


And there is the pedestrian aspect of having to provide trash cans for tourists. At a former concentration and extermination camp.

You'd think people could just take their junk with them and sort it out later. Like, look where you fucking are - deal with the rubbish later. Just leave it in your hand.

But people as a group are assholes.
posted by Dysk at 12:32 PM on December 28, 2016


Selfies at Auschwitz, previously.
posted by Rumple at 2:08 PM on December 28, 2016


I will note that I did actually take a selfie myself at Auschwitz, at the infamous "Arbeit Macht Frei" gate. I wanted to place myself there. I don't think selfies in and of themselves are the issue, though oddly I think I'd do just about anything before using a selfie stick in that place.

We all draw the line in a different place, I guess. I'm not going to judge, so long as someone's making a sincere attempt to be respectful of the site and the human beings who were killed there.
posted by adamgreenfield at 3:59 PM on December 28, 2016 [3 favorites]


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