Projects of the year 2004-2005: reactions from students

Impression of travel

Maintaining this past is moving towards the future...

Transmitting this painful story is leaving Yesterday is living Today is thinking about Tomorrow...

To not forget

Not to deny

To not ignore

To commemorate

To admit

To know

Remembering Auschwitz and the rest...

We followed the endless road of the rails.

We did not immediately see the end.

We don’t see this end right away.

They seem to go to infinity these rails.

We followed the path of the deportees from Auschwitz...

The latrines are still there.

If one can call these gaping holes and stuck to each other 'latrines'. Were they really used by men? The aberrant proximity connecting one hole to another leaves in these places a certain bestiality. They did not even bother to detach from the wall the rings that, in this old barn, were used to tie up the cattle. They are still there, and must have reminded the deportees each time of the condition to which they were kept...

Today in Auschwitz, it is cold, very cold but the weather is nice.

Curiously today, Auschwitz is not black, it doesn’t snow like in the movies.

The weather is nice.

Have they experienced days like this, sunny and witnesses to the sweetness of life? How many have then despaired of no longer enjoying them freely? How many on the contrary, have thus taken courage for some time to come, saying that it would end soon ?

At the back of the camp, there are the ruins of the crematory ovens and gas chambers destroyed by the Nazis. There remains, on either side of the monument dedicated to the victims, only a heap of bricks, which still seem smoking.

On these ruins, a rose.

It’s a beautiful message that this rose here. A silent message from someone who has seen, who tried to understand, who tells them goodbye perhaps to those people who died where these traces of past horror lie...

Arbeit macht frei.

We finally see this sign. The work makes free. Were they really free the men of Auschwitz ? The deportees prisoners of their own death, their executioners of their own madness...

The place of the call is still there. The wall of executions too. There remains even the gallows, black, erect, sinister where the Last one died.

He is today at Auschwitz, a wall covered with photographs. This mischievous smile of the little boy, the brother and sister who hold hands for the time of a cliché, these poses of wise children, these family portraits, these embraces, these carefree friends, are nods to Life... These are human looks, human gestures, of free men and in peace.

So why them?

What do these people have of different ?

What did we have more than them?

What did they have less than us?

These photos on the great black wall are a thousand times more moving than the vision of corpses or crematory ovens because they are the evidence of the absurdity of the Nazi work, they reflect this unimaginable undertaking for any human being worthy of the name of Man.

What remains of this murderous madness,

it’s this heap of shoes, worn and drilled from all sides,

it’s this ocean of aged and discolored hair by time,

it’s this pile of twisted crutches

but also these torn teeth, these chipped combs, these rusty glasses and these suitcases where the names of countless families that are no longer there are still clearly visible, carefully written in large characters...

One cannot cry at Auschwitz. The pain, the desolation one feels goes beyond tears.

The first gas chamber commissioned at Auschwitz is the last of the places to visit.

It’s first this dark room, cold and totally naked.

At the top, the opening through which the gas arrived. [... ]Then there is this black room, lit only by the candles that are left there.

The message that we will have left is these lights that shine in this total darkness of the first gas chamber of Auschwitz.

Now there is this song.

A very serious song, very soft, very deep too. The men who sing are Jewish. They came to Auschwitz and they pray, standing, swaying back and forth, cradling their pain the torah in their hands... Behind them there are the crematory ovens, lit by candles. These lights are scary. They are for us, who have not experienced this past, like the devouring fire of the crematorium. But they also relieve and soothe, because they are the goodbye to these millions of deaths that we will never be able to mourn...

One cannot cry in Auschwitz. The pain, the desolation that one feels goes beyond tears.

We did not see the unnameable, we saw what he left...

The face of this man is serious.

When he speaks, a religious silence listens to him.

This man returned from Auschwitz, he tells us.

He suffers this man, he is tired.

We touched his dignity, wanted to strip him of his humanity...

He is there to say the inexpressible, to testify of the unthinkable.

Does he expect us to understand ?

Or does he only want to make us understand that all this is of the order of the incomprehensible?

He will always suffer this man...

The wound that opened in him will never heal,

He even revives her, carrying on his shoulders the heavy burden,

Of the one who testifies,

Of the one who transmits,

Of the one who keeps this memory alive.

The wound that opened in us is not as deep, nor of such sharp pain,

But she is there...

It must be revived even, by relaying him and the others, by taking on this same burden,

Of those who testify,

Of those who transmit,

Of those who maintain this memory,

In the name of what we saw at Auschwitz...

Samanta Barot, 1e L, Lycée du Cheylard (07), April 2005

There are places that one would never want to have to visit. Places synonymous with barbarism, testimony of a recent past that one would like to forget. Auschwitz is one of those places, those moments in our history that will forever remain engraved in our memories.

And again, we are just visitors. We are only present in this camp to try to understand the incomprehensible, to try to imagine the unimaginable. Witnesses survived this hell, we, we are just passing through.

Auschwitz is a kind of distorting mirror: by observing what is left, by listening to the testimonies of the survivors, we come to wonder what we would have done ourselves in this situation, if we had been German, Jewish or Resistant... Would we have let it happen? Would we have acted for or against? Would we have remained impassive ?

During the trip, we don’t really feel. We wander, we store the lyrics, we question, we even catch ourselves laughing with the witness. It is upon returning that images and words form this necessarily emotional whole because no written document is identical to another, because there was this contact, this testimony, and this man or woman who gave us part of his memories. I wonder moreover if the emotional force is not, in the case of Auschwitz, derived from the intrigued gaze one has on the witness: How is it possible to survive at Auschwitz?

At the end of such a day, images jostle and gradually the link is established between imagination, knowledge and the place visited. Time works and raises questions that seem to have no answers: How can a man put another man through this ? How can a single man awaken the 'monster' within us?

The museum is really something frozen. The feeling of the moment is a mixture of shame and torpor, ashamed to be a voyeur, simple visitor often without strong emotion, impassive from one place to another, because each meter reveals the impossible. There is therefore a mix of disappointment regarding this feeling, but the discomfort is indeed there, by rethinking that other people have disappeared here one day without understanding where they had arrived.

Auschwitz is a must-see when visiting Poland. The "never again" too often overused here takes on its true meaning.

Romy (15 years old) – Talence Youth Activity Centre (33)

APRIL 6, 2005...

I leave at 3 o'clock, tired of having watched until then in total impatience; this recurring sentence haunts my mind: "There is nothing to see in Auschwitz," reinforced by this fear of remaining insensitive to the rubble of this massacre. I take my first steps in Birkenau; a place that leaves me speechless when there is so much to say about my knowledge and imagination, which completes my vision of this indefinable space and this succession of horrible images ties my heart.

Jules, on these rails that he has crossed in terror, tells us with the strength that remains to him, his past, which we can barely understand in this world where everything is offered to us. So emotion, rage, hatred, suffering, mingle with his speech, without remembrance, his ineffable memories are read in his gaze, and we, teenagers, adults, simply human beings of the 21st century, united in compassion and pain, let us understand that in Auschwitz there was everything: life, evil, death... and everyone reacts as they can, a sob, a lowered head, a sidelining or even a semblance of impassibility...

And me, deeply tested by this poignant testimony that comes from the guts, I look at Jules, this deportee, small, a bit lame, funny in appearance, and I let my mind conceive what it never wanted to conceive: my mother, my sister, my father, shaved, violated, crowded in these gas chambers, transported to crematory ovens that will reduce their bodies to 'dust' on which others will walk, as we ourselves have unconsciously done. Then, in the face of this undeniable reality, which has overcome our previous doubts, that some are trying to deny, which others are indifferent to, the experience of sharing and humanity has erased all our differences and brought together beings linked by an emotional shock... (...)

"I am the past, you are the future ", such was Jules' last word, aware of being one of the few traces of this tragedy and proud to pass on to us the torch, which we will hold with passion for him, for those who have died, for us, and for those who will be born...

Erika, student from 1st grade, Maine high school in Biran, Bergerac (24)