Express Visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau

[6 April 2005]

To serve the visitors' attention

Gilles Clamens

Professor of Philosophy (Lycée Maine de Biran, Bergerac)

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

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

AUSCHWITZ-BIRKENAU

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

		Many parallelepipeds of brick, at the height of a man or a woman, are topped with tall trees on two gentle slopes, and placed on a lawn already quite green in this early spring. The set of these well-aligned houses is dotted with small wooden viewpoints mounted on their stilts - some with a lattice, others not; many with a Chinese note (small pagodas) this neat and very maintained landscape.
	An element everywhere present, of this landscape, however, recalls the function of places. These are cement posts, aligned as far as the eye can see on one or more rows, high like twice a man or a woman, and finished in the shape of a crook; they are connected by barbed 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 the ceramic pads 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 like held up or raised by metal buttresses painted black, riveted together in disorder as to prevent an imminent fall. Thus one has the impression of a collapse whose movement would have been frozen without it having stopped happening. This very image seems more moving than the great stratification of cobblestone beaches topped by a symbolic chaos (chimney, disordered cemetery) of the memorial itself - where one stops to reflect.

While listening to the guides' reports, crossing a cohort of young Jewish pilgrims carrying or wearing the Israeli flag, and lowering their eyes, one can see a ladybug, otherwise called 'beast for goodness sake'. Looking up, we see that the birches are beautiful, and large 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', one walks on a narrow floor of large glass tiles whose translucency is green as water, placing them on blocks that raise it to a few centimeters from the paved ground marked with large cracks, and finally the rhythmic walk of the visitors who follow each other closely, make think of a floating floor.

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Summary