Express Visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau

[6 April 2005]

To be used for the attention of visitors

Gilles Clamens

Professor of Philosophy (Lycée Maine de Biran, Bergerac)

From Bordeaux to Krakow (Krakow - Jean-Paul II airport) it takes about three hours. Then, an hour and a half for the road between Krakow and Oswiecim, by the detour. On this very busy road, where the urbanization recalls the films of Kieslowski, one can see a billboard for "LEWIATHAN" and portraits of John Paul II lined with black, stuck to the windows of private houses; all the national flags are at half-mast.

Still an important rail switching point, the modern station of Oswiecim is surrounded by a traffic of immense trains pulling coal wagons.

AUSCHWITZ-BIRKENAU

The word "selection" also has an academic meaning. Should we forget it?

		Many brick parallelepipeds, at man’s or woman’s height, are topped with grandstoits with two gentle slopes, and placed on a lawn already green enough in early spring. All of these well-aligned houses are dotted with small wooden watchtowers mounted on their stilts - some with clerestories, others not; many have a Chinese touch (small pagodas) in this neat, very maintained landscape.
	An element that is present everywhere in this landscape, however, recalls the function of places. These are cement posts, lined up as far as the eye can see on one or more rows, high as two times a man or a woman, and finished in the shape of a crook; they are connected by barbed wire wires themselves connected to ceramic studs embedded in the concrete of the posts, at regularly spaced heights. Closer at the bottom and at the top, less in the center, the barbed wire lines insulated by ceramic studs are thus ready for highly efficient electrification.

Near the memorial (where about thirty masts are lowered as for multiple borders) the ruins of one of the extermination buildings are as if held up or raised by metal buttresses painted in black, riveted together in disorder as to prevent an imminent fall in extremis. Thus one has the impression of a collapse whose movement would have been frozen without it ceasing to take place. This very image seems more moving than the great stratification of paved beaches surmounted by a symbolic chaos (fireplace, disordered cemetery) of the memorial itself - where one stops to reflect.

Listening to the guides' reports, crossing a cohort of young Jewish pilgrims carrying or wearing the Israeli flag, and looking down, we can see a ladybug, otherwise called "beast for God’s sake". Looking up, we see that the birches are beautiful, and tall pines change their black bark at the bottom for a very light red bark, almost orange, at the top.

In the building visited last, which tries to show the "evidence," we walk on a narrow floor of large glass tiles whose translucency is green as water, placing them on pedestals that raise them to just a few centimeters from the paved ground marked with large cracks. and finally the rhythmic march of visitors who follow one another closely, make think of a floating floor.

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Summary