Projects of the year 2004-2005: reactions from students

Travel Impression

Maintaining this past is moving forward into the future...

To pass on this painful story is to leave Yesterday is to live Today is to think of Tomorrow...

So as not to forget

Not to deny

Not to ignore

To commemorate

To admit

To find out

Remember Auschwitz and the rest...

We followed the endless road of rails.

We did not immediately see the end.

We don’t see this end right away.

They seem to go up to infinity these rails.

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

The latrines are still there.

If we can call these gaping holes, stuck together, "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 had to remind the deportees each time of the condition to which they were put...

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

Curiously today, Auschwitz is not black, it does not snow as in the movies.

The weather is nice.

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

At the back of the camp, there are the ruins of the crematoria and gas chambers destroyed by the Nazis. On each side of the monument dedicated to the victims, only a pile of bricks remains, 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 perhaps says goodbye to those people who died where the traces of past horror lie...

Arbeit macht frei.

We finally see this sign. Work makes people free. Were the men of Auschwitz really free? ? The deported 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.

It is now in Auschwitz, a wall covered with photographs. This mischievous smile of the little boy, the brother and sister holding hands for the time of a cliché, these poses of good children, these family portraits, these embraces, these carefree friends, are nods to life... These are human glances, human gestures, free men and at peace.

So why them?

What do these people have that is different ?

What did we have that they didn’t?

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 evidence of the absurdity of the Nazi work, they reflect this unimaginable undertaking for any human being worthy of the name of Man.

What’s left of this murderous madness,

It’s this heap of shoes, worn and pierced from all sides,

It’s this ocean of hair aged and faded by time,

it’s this pile of twisted crutches

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

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

The first gas chamber, commissioned at Auschwitz, is the last place to visit.

It’s first of all this dark room, cold and completely naked.

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

The message that we will have left, it is these gleams which shine in this total blackness of the first gas chamber of Auschwitz.

Now there is this song.

A very low-pitched song, very soft, and also very deep. The men who sing are Jews. They came to Auschwitz and they pray, standing, swinging back and forth, cradling their pain the torah in their hands... Behind them there are the crematory ovens, lit by candles. These lights are frightening. 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 grieve...

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

We didn’t see the unnamable, we saw what he left...

This man’s face is serious.

When he speaks, a religious silence listens to him.

This man came back from Auschwitz, he tells.

He is suffering this man, he is tired.

We touched his dignity, wanting to tear away his humanity...

He is there to speak the unspeakable, to bear witness to the unthinkable.

Does he expect us to understand ?

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

He will always suffer this man...

The wound that opened inside him will never heal,

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

Of the one who testifies,

Of the one who transmits,

Of the one who maintains this memory.

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

But she’s here...

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

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

Auschwitz is a kind of distorting mirror: by observing what remains, 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 unmoved ?

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

At the end of such a day, images shake 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 wake up the "monster" hidden within us?

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

Auschwitz is a must when you go to Poland. The overused phrase "never again" takes on its true meaning here.

Romy (15 years old) – Talence youth activity center (33)

April 6, 2005...

I leave at 3 o'clock, tired of having watched until then in total impatience; this recurring phrase haunts my mind: "There is nothing to see at 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 my imagination, completing my vision of this indefinable space and this succession of horrible images ties my heart.

Jules, on these rails he crossed in terror, tells us with the strength that remains to him, his past, that we can barely understand in this world where everything is offered to us. Then emotion, rage, hatred, suffering, mingle with his speech, without reminiscence, his ineffable memories are read in his eyes, and we, teenagers, adults, simply human beings of the twenty-first century, united in compassion and pain, let’s understand that at 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 out of my bones, I look at Jules, this deportee, small, a little lame, funny in appearance, and I let my mind conceive what it never wanted to conceive: my mother, my sister, my father, shaved, violated, crammed into 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, faced with this indisputable reality, which has exceeded our previous doubts, which some people try to deny, and which others are indifferent to, the experience of sharing and humanity has erased all our differences and brought together beings bound by an emotional shock...

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

Erika, student of 1ère L, lycée Maine de Biran, Bergerac (24)