Unreal

Posted by Joe Deegan (Waterville, ME, United States) on 3 October 2008 in Miscellaneous.

How can you explain an Auschwitz sunset?

Questions like this have been on my mind for the past few hours. The combination of tragedy and beauty I saw this week feels overwhelming. I am reminded of Eliot again, from the section of “East Coker” I posted a few days ago— “old stones that cannot be deciphered.” That’s what much of this trip was about for me. I frustrated myself trying to understand. I wanted so badly to contextualize what I was seeing and hearing.

Being among the ruins of a concentration camp is numbing. It’s really as if the human brain has an emotional nervous system that raises your atrocity threshold. How else could you stand around where thousands and thousands and thousands of innocent people were robbed of life and feel anything but abject horror? As I walked through the empty corridors, listening to our tour guide and peering into glass display cases, it felt like there was something deeply wrong with life. I faced an absurd paradox: Modernity, the same set of ideological coordinates that made the Holocaust possible, also conditioned my understanding and experience of Auschwitz. Rising out of the Polish countryside was an existential riddle of brick and mortar, complete with signposts and audio commentary.

I thought of my grandfather as a young G.I. in the war, seeing it all firsthand. No wonder why he could not return to Poland for nearly half a century.

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