...To Those Who Raise an Eyebrow at the Poets

The Camp at Mauthausen sat grave, grey, authentically numbing. The wind washed over the barren hills of the nearby countryside, bringing with it a barrage of snow and freezing rain which snuck under the collar of my peacoat and through the thin cotton of my gloves until the sub-freezing temperature had burrowed inside of me, chilling me from the stomach outwards. I wandered through the barracks and fields with my oversized audioguide (forced to keep one hand out of my wool pocket, clasping its awkward bulk to my ear, horrible punishment in its own quiet way), my coat pulled tight against the snow and cutting wind. The numbers and testimonials that swept into my ear in a measured English accent were unreal, horrifying—thousands of deaths, overcrowded tent camps, starvation walks, ashes from the ovens dumped indiscriminately into piles along the road, people being hosed down naked and forced to run outside in the snow (imagine! I pull my woolen coat tighter against my ribs), prostitutes shipped in from Treblinka as part of the so-called “camp incentive system”, medicinal tests on prisoners...it was seemingly endless, one long pavilion of human suffering and sleet slipping down my neck.

Eventually, I began distancing myself—I had to distance myself, disconnect me and my own humanity from the people who lived and starved and burned here on the white-washed strips of cement. But when I did allow the tiniest connection, two wires of application brushed together to snap into a spark of personal impact (—these testimonials of dying men suddenly becoming my dad’s, my brothers’—can I imagine them here? Those skinny knees, those swollen eyes as theirs?—) I was overwhelmed with grief, amazement, disbelief, and that unswallowable question: how?

A quote from one man saved me. I found his story recorded in a solitary booth inside the stone-gray museum, his interview from 2003. His name was Leon Ceglarz, and he was Polish—and after 15 minutes of watching him explain the plummeting sequence of his life: capture, grueling labor, starvation, even being beaten almost to death with a soup ladle (a soup ladle! What a debasing way to be tortured!), he ended, and his dignified old-man eyes wrinkled with tears; explaining that to survive, we needed to connect ourselves with humanity, to not forget the ties we hold to one another. For him, he clung to his ties of family (a wife and new baby, only four months old when he left); to Poland, the reason his imprisonment in Mauthasen in the first place; for the young people he had taught before the war; these were the things that kept him human.

And, finally—and when he said this next part, the tears moved from the creases of his eyes to his cheeks, and I, watching a screen with headphones strapped to my ears, I began to cry too, struck with the importance (essentiality?) of language and words and expression—he said that: “I stood outside doors left ajar and listened to beautiful poetry—and that is what strengthened me.”

Humanity, family, hope, nation, and poetry.

What beautiful, crucial things to live for.