MY "PROJECT LOG"
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 6, FLIGHT SEU-962-L TO KRAKOW
On this Tuesday evening, the day before departure, impossible to sleep. Impossible to close an eye, even for a second. Too many things, too many questions that will remain unanswered.
At three o'clock, in front of the high school, everyone is at the meeting...or almost...
Pale faces, tense smiles. I am relieved, they do not seem to be in the state of excitement that usually characterizes a school trip.
But, it must be well recognized that this trip does not ultimately have much of a scholastic quality, despite the conditions in which it takes place.
I think I did everything I could to convey a piece of the stolen dignity to the victims. Anyway, I couldn’t go any further... Not the courage, not the desire...
I still haven’t provided an answer to this question that bothers me: "why go to Auschwitz?"
At the show of this vocational high school class on this plane with us, vulgar, unable to remain seated, blocking the central aisle, giggling like idiots and who do not seem to be aware of where they are going, I catch myself thinking (why?) that they do not deserve to go to Auschwitz. What will they be able to understand there, these kids who were clucking, torn between fear and excitement during takeoff? Should we really inflict this on the memory of this million annihilated beings?
A quick glance back at mine... Reassured... They do not move. Calmly sitting, they discuss. Not too much laughter, at least not too loud. That reassures my conscience as a teacher who still believes - who sometimes still believes - that her students are the reflection of what she is. Ridiculous!
Ah! Benjamin with a camera... First downside... What had I said though? No cameras, no more than cell phones. We’re not going to go on a photo safari at the Palmyre zoo... Missed... A souvenir photo of the friends, like in any other place... Does this mean that in ten years, fifteen or twenty years, the only memory that will remain will be this one, the photo of the group in front of a brick wall of which we no longer know exactly what it was?
Well... Let’s avoid dramatizing before even arriving at the crime scene. Even before letting this day pass. The time is not yet up to the assessments. Isn’t the main thing that a trace remains? I’m tired of hearing nonsense about the Holocaust, untruths and approximations. It is not a question of future generations who will prevent 'this' from happening again. Simple respect for the memory of suffering. Simple respect for History itself.
I would like to be able to remember this very beautiful text on history, quoted in the last chapter of the Wieviorka, entitled "why Auschwitz?". But, the words do not return. The only thing I access at this moment is a sensation. That of the reader who, writing so poorly, is reassured, comforted to read in another’s words what, coming from deep within her heart, she cannot express.
THURSDAY, APRIL 7, VELIBOR RESPONSE
"Here it has been raining for a week, and it is coming (the rain) well - me too, I am very, very 'gray' if I may say... Like that, the sky, the fleet and me - we go very well together...
There is an infinity of greys and some are brighter than others.
My gray yesterday, facing the entrance of Birkenau, was opaque and threatening. It prevented me from breathing and confused my senses. He was telling me very clearly to turn back.
During the day, this gray changed. There was the gray of distress in the eyes of my kids. A gray who said, even before their words conceive it, the pain of awareness. Fright and astonishment. Many of them took refuge in my arms, and my gray self became a little less opaque, a little brighter. One can be hurt by the pain of others, out of oneself, out of one’s family ties and out of one’s own time.
Then, this gray lit up again. When on his knees, very close to Crematorium no. 2, the heat of the flame of a lighter ignited the wick of these ten small candles for these ten souls crushed in this hell.
Strange feeling of appeasement than that of honoring an old promise to a tender friend who cannot yet wander in these places himself, so much does it scare him. Appeasement also because Birkenau is so calm, so quiet. Nature does not care about the suffering of men. The birds, from now on, sing anew in Birkenau. Strange things happen there in this so strange place. I didn’t manage to feel it as the largest cemetery in the world. I felt a place of life there, I felt "their" presence. Beings with immense eyes, wandering in the grassy ruins of what was the place of their torture. Immense eyes, full of compassion, for the tears that the living shed there. It seemed to me that this 6-year-old child is not a prisoner of Jean-Marie’s chest, as he says, but that he was sitting there, on a pile of red bricks, so monstrously typical of the region, looking, vaguely indifferent, perhaps a bit curious, ten small flames flickering at the foot of a stele black as death.
I also saw a Gilles Clamens, exceptionally silent. I have often followed her silhouette with my gaze, walking in front of me, her schoolbag in hand. Because Gilles came to Auschwitz with his classroom bag, so full that the closure threatened to open at every moment. Inside, neatly arranged,
I saw Anne Servat, pale, so terribly pale, walking mechanically. She seemed to me a being who came back from the dead.
Strange place than Birkenau. How many places are there where, among some fifty people, you can still feel alone? I felt pain in Birkenau. I felt pain in the Stammlager. And yet I am happy that this pain hit me. It was Jules who accompanied us. A little Jules, a little man with gray hair and very blue eyes, whose testimony sometimes starts in terrible sobs. His gaze, which is initially veiled, which gets lost in a time, which for us is colorless, gray like archival images, then words that no longer "come out", the voice that breaks and the long hiccup of distress. These archival images are then, for us, changed from gray to color. A body that hunger has dislocated and placed in an oven is no longer gray, from this past gray of the memory learned. I took a great lesson in humanity at Auschwitz. Thanks to Jules, who returns to this place, tirelessly, despite the suffering, to talk about it to children who are so far from all that.
And the miracle is that this distancing abruptly disappeared, the suffering became also theirs. I truly doubted the relevance of bringing high school students on a 'trip' to Auschwitz for a few hours. How many hours, precisely, spent with Gilles and Anne to discuss this question. ! What vanity! How could we doubt, question ourselves, gloss endlessly about this?! Also out of the camp, as we were getting ready to hit the road again, I understood that one day I would need to return to Auschwitz. Can you believe this? That in a place where millions of people were trying to survive, annihilated by the idea that they would never get out, one can feel the imperious desire, the imperious need to return? Strange place that Auschwitz...
Forgive me for having got you drunk with that, for showing off my navel like this... my life, my work, what I felt at Auschwitz... But, it’s stronger than me, I just let my fingers run on the keyboard. Here too it rains.
Kisses.
Nathalie.
FRIDAY 8 APRIL, OF UNEXPECTED REACTIONS
16 hours, visibly very moved, the students enter class, they are all there, even those who are not in 1
Many are those who say their dismay in the face of the misunderstanding of others. They henceforth consider themselves to belong to a kind of circle: those who were there, those who saw, those who know. Very frequently, they tell having felt a violent anger against their comrades who, not having shared this experience with them, ask them "so, was it nice Auschwitz?" , "was it good?". They say they are outraged that one can ask for such things, while admitting that they found themselves unjust to make such reproaches. Some cried because they were suffering from not being able to talk about it to anyone. They were eagerly waiting for these two hours of class to finally be able to talk about it "among themselves, who know and feel the same thing". An identical problem occurs in families. There are those who feel they have been lucky, because they were able to speak with their parents. They all report that they couldn’t stop talking. The words were endless. Others, and especially residents or those whose parents were not present for professional reasons, admit to having had a very trying day on Thursday, torn between the need to speak and the measure of the difficulty in putting into words what they were feeling. For some, it seemed necessary to then go through the written word. They put on paper what they could not say.
I am particularly worried about this feeling they evoke of feeling henceforth cut off from others. The work of restitution is therefore essential, for the memory of the Shoah, certainly, but also and especially in this case, for themselves. They react with great violence to the words of those who 'dared' to tell them that we had to turn the page, that it was in the past, that they were lucky to have made this trip, but that it was necessary to move on. Summary, altogether very normal and understandable, of what most parents, distraught by their tears, were able to tell them. They claim not to want to turn the page precisely, that it is too important. That one might consider that it is from the past, certainly terrible, certainly not to be forgotten, but that it is from the past, seems obscene.
At the risk of being excessive, listening to them, I sometimes had the impression that they were in an almost mystical perception. This is especially perceptible in their indignation following the behavior of some of the students from Bordeaux who visited the same group. The lack of recollection, respect and manifestation of sharing suffering deeply shocked them. Two days after the trip, tears still come to their eyes at the evocation of certain reflections or attitudes of these students from Bordeaux.
It is true that some of these students had a "borderline" behavior, but I know, as a teacher, that we do not control everything, that some students are difficult regardless of the circumstances and that the "group effect" can make some become odious. I even expected, within this class that I was accompanying, behaviors that exceed the teachers, but which we know are inevitable (like, for example, the student who looks at his watch in front of the crematory ovens and says "when I think that at this hour we should be in class!"). Can we really blame them? On this Wednesday, April 6, I admit to having been very surprised not to have heard any such reflection and very surprised by the contemplation with which the students approached this visit. And to be perfectly honest, I felt a strange pride about it. "My" students were perfect!! It is a class in which I am the main teacher and which, besides history-geography, I supervise in ECJS and TPE, for an average of 7 hours per week. Our relationships are rather very good, I particularly appreciate working with them and I believe that the reciprocal is true for most of them, when reading the notes they slipped with the bouquet of flowers. Maybe in my relationship to the Shoah and my way of teaching it, I went too far. Maybe I revealed myself too much, I showed myself too affected by my subject of study. I probably committed a fault by losing sight of what makes history. Triggering thus, reactions in cha ne that escape all control. I knew that this trip would affect them (otherwise, I wouldn’t have set up this project) and that it would bring a "plus" to their history class, but I didn’t imagine for a second that it would be such streams of tears, such palpable suffering. I don’t really know how to handle it.