OSWIECIM, Poland—Ever since I learned that our tour group would be visiting here, I had wondered how it would look, how it would feel. If all you know about Auschwitz is what you’ve read in history books and newspapers, you probably imagine it as being utterly different from anything else you’ve ever seen, totally unlike anything else on Planet Earth—as somehow having the poisonous atmosphere of some pestilential planet on the forgotten far side of the universe.

What you’re not prepared for is for anything around here to look normal. And yet so much of it does. As our tour bus travels the two-lane highway between Krakow and Oswiecim, only about a 30-mile drive, I’m struck by how normal, even familiar, so much of the scenery looks. We pass through rolling countryside, tidy farm fields, woodlots, crossroads hamlets that look much like any of a dozen different places in the American Midwest. When I was fresh out of college, working as a newspaper reporter and editor in rural Michigan, I saw scenery like this every day while making my rounds from one small town to another. There are billboards hawking all the usual products; farmhouses with small religious shrines in their front yards; cows and horses grazing in the pastures; roadside traffic signs warning drivers to watch out for pedestrians, for playing children, for deer.

Finally we reach Oswiecim—a modern, functioning city, a market town and regional transportation center that’s home to 40,000 people. That’s probably another surprise to a lot of people: that the old Nazi concentration camp site is not all that’s here. There’s an actual city where people run businesses, go to school, live their daily lives. Just as in other, larger Polish cities, many of the ground floors of buildings are marked with youthful graffiti, almost all of which seems to be connected somehow to local soccer teams. Satellite TV dishes are tacked onto the outer walls of almost every house and apartment block. We pass a cartage company with a parking lot full of trucks, a window-making factory, shops of all kinds. We pass a huge new department store that has just been built by the French chain Carrefour; a sign nearby announces an impending grand opening date. Like every other city in Poland, it has a discount store called “Biedronka,” with a sign showing a smiling cartoon ladybug, and a 7-11 type convenience store called “Zabka,” with a sign showing a smiling cartoon frog. There’s even a BP gas station with a coffee shop, for God’s sake. How much closer to normal life can you get than this?

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When we finally arrive at the actual camp site, the parking lot in front is full of private cars and tour buses from all over Europe. Vending machines line a nearby sidewalk. Right across the roadway is a modern hotel, and a restaurant serving Chinese food, of all things. We enter the visitors’ center, where the story of this place is explained by signs on the walls in many different languages. At least 1 million people come here every year—many of them visitors to Poland whose tours include it on their agenda; school groups from many different countries; others from across Europe, from America, from Israel. It seems blasphemous to call it a “tourist attraction,” but it is; not many tourists come to Oswiecim to see anything else.

Another thing you probably imagine about Auschwitz if you’ve never been here is that everything is on a larger-than-life scale. But actually, the barbed-wire-enclosed camp site, also known as “Auschwitz I,” is not all that big. You can easily walk across the entire enclosure, as we did, in just a few minutes. Even the famous gate with the slogan “Arbeit Macht Frei” (Work Makes One Free) is barely big enough to let a good-sized pickup truck pass underneath.
We go through the visitors’ center, then underneath the gate, and explore the barracks—originally a military compound which was already more than 50 years old when the Nazis seized it in 1940. We see piled up, in separate compartments behind glass, the stacks of suitcases with people’s names on them; the hair shorn from women’s heads; the eyeglasses, artificial limbs, crutches that were taken from these people before they were killed. We file past rooms where starving, terrorized prisoners fitfully slept on dirty burlap bags stuffed with straw, and a cramped cell where a Polish priest, Maximilian Kolbe, now a saint of the Catholic Church, died of a lethal injection of carbolic acid after two weeks of starvation. (He offered his life in place of another Polish prisoner who had been randomly selected for death, and who ended up surviving the war.) We walk past walls lined with framed pictures of some of the people who died here, and into the execution yard between blocks 10 and 11, and touch a brick wall against which so many inmates were shot and killed. Finally, we walk through the nearby remnant of a gas chamber. Naturally, no one speaks. This is a place to think, not talk.

Among the other visitors while we’re here, we notice, is a large group of young people from Israel. Most are wearing white T-shirts with blue Hebrew lettering; some are clad in athletic jackets with the word “Israel” on the back. Some of the young men and boys wear skullcaps; one of them carries an Israeli flag, wrapped around his shoulders like a prayer shawl. Of the estimated 1.5 million persons who eventually died here, we’re told, about 1.1 million were Jewish. But contrary to the impression most people have, during its first two years of operation the vast majority of Auschwitz’s inmates were not Jewish. In 1940-41 it was used primarily to intern Polish Gentiles—professors, political leaders, priests, resistance movement members. Later, many Soviet Army POWs were also sent here. They were all to provide a slave labor force of 100,000 for a nearby I.G. Farben factory. It wasn’t until early 1942, after Hitler’s notorious “Wannsee Conference,” that it became primarily a place of extermination for Jews. And another irony: the vast majority of them were not from among Poland’s 3 million-plus prewar Jewish population—who mostly died in other camps in Poland or in its ghettos. Those who were killed here were primarily shipped by rail from other European countries: the Netherlands, Italy, Greece, Hungary, France, among others. That rail is still here, too, right across the road.

Finally, our bus travels a little over a mile from the “Auschwitz I” site, over a bridge to the site of the mostly destroyed village of Brzezinka (Birkenau); and then, without leaving the bus, we see a vast spread of decaying wooden enclosures in front of us. This is “Auschwitz II,” which really is a huge place, and where the vast majority of prisoners were held. And there, on the road between Oswiecim and Brzezinka, is another subdivision of homes; another example of people rebuilding and living their lives where life ended for so many.

Our guide through the camp, a pleasant young man in his 20s named Wojciech—who told us he learned English in high school and by “watching lots of American movies”—explains that his own grandfather died in Auschwitz. So did many other local residents, whose families had been here for generations. But Hitler considered this area to be rightfully a part of Germany, so when the Nazis invaded, they set out to expel all the locals and replace them only with Germans, Wojciech tells us. His grandfather refused to go, so he was killed. Yet after the war, his family came back. And so did most of the others, and they chose to rebuild their lives here, right down the road from the unthinkable. Their home had been desecrated, yes, but it was still their home—and they weren’t the ones who put this place here.

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There is a now legal requirement in many states, including Illinois, that public schools provide “Holocaust education.” You know, “teaching the lessons” of Auschwitz—meaning the history of anti-Semitism, the consequences of ethnic and religious hostility, an effort to promote greater understanding and tolerance among peoples. And yes, that is one lesson of this place. But it’s not the only one. I can think of at least two other lessons, which I doubt are being taught in any of these courses—and without which the first lesson may end up being of somewhat limited value.

One is that Auschwitz is an extreme example of what can happen to a society when people start to arrogate to themselves the right to play God, and to presume to know who is deserving of life, and who isn’t. You know—like with abortion on demand, euthanasia, so-called assisted suicide, embryonic stem-cell research, the “right to die” movement? In the early 1900s, Germany was the most scientifically advanced nation in the world—but even in the pre-Hitler era, it also had a very strong sentiment favoring euthanasia for those judged less than “ideal.” As former U.S. surgeon general C. Everett Koop explained in a book on medical ethics 20 years ago, it started with “defective” babies (which, back in the late 1950s, would have included me), then moved on to the insane, then those with senile dementia, then those with advanced tuberculosis, then amputees, etc., etc., etc.

Do some of you wonder why some of us make such a big deal over these issues? This is why. It’s called the slippery slope. Germany’s combination of advanced science and widespread support for euthanasia ended up going down an unanticipated path. More and more people who should have known better started putting their feet on that slope—and when the Nazis seized power, it gave them a quasi-legal pretext to extend the idea to others they deemed “undesirable.” In fact, many of the people who were involved in the “Final Solution” even rationalized that since their victims had all been condemned to death by their government anyway, giving them “mass euthanasia” in a gas chamber—as opposed to using firing squads, mass starvation and epidemics, etc.—was actually a more “humane” way to do it!

Fast forward to America at the start of the 21st century. On top of more than 35 years of abortion on demand as a “constitutional right” and growing support for euthanasia, “assisted suicide,” etc., now our national administration and Congress is seeking to adopt, on “humani-tarian” grounds, a massive nationalization of the health care industry in which government bureaucrats apparently would be given unprecedented power to make decisions about “end-of-life” care for the elderly and terminally ill, and for purely economic reasons. Are we not perhaps about to go down a new, unanticipated path ourselves? Is there not an unlearned lesson here?

And here’s another lesson: Auschwitz is also an extreme example of what can happen to a nation that lacks the power—or the will—to keep out and defeat hostile forces who are bent on inflicting evil upon it. What happened in Poland, including what happened to the Jews, is a case in point. For most of its history, Poland was more tolerant of Jews than most other European countries—that’s why they settled here after they were driven out of those other countries. Do you think the Polish people prior to World War II ever imagined anything like this on their soil? And yet once the Nazis (and the Soviets) invaded and conquered the country, Poland’s people—Gentile and Jewish alike—were virtually powerless to stop it.

Fast forward again to America at the start of the 21st century. In 2001, for the first time since the British Army burned the White House in 1814, the American mainland was attacked by a hostile force intent on inflicting evil upon us. Almost 3,000 people, most of them relatively young and healthy, were killed on one morning. We resolved not to let it happen to us again—remember? Eight years later, what is our national administration doing? Making threatening noises against those who worked to prevent such a thing from happening to us again. Unlike the Poles 70 years ago, we still have the power to fight back against those who would inflict evil upon us—but increasingly, our government, and many other people in positions of power and influence, seem to lack the will to use it. Is there not another unlearned lesson here?

Many Americans these days love to throw around the word “Nazi”—especially those who, for instance, seem to think that “Nazi” is a synonym for “conservative Republican,” or “white Christian,” or “American military man.” But they really don’t have the slightest idea of what they’re talking about, or of what this place was all about. If they want to find out, maybe they should ask the Israelis, who represent the remnants of the vast majority who were killed here, who were regarded as “unworthy of life” by a hostile force intent on inflicting evil—and who now find themselves under threat again, from other villains. Maybe they should ask the Poles, people like Wojciech and his family, who have been left with this place and several others like it in their midst, forever. For that matter, perhaps they should also ask the present generations of Germans, none of whom have any personal responsibility for what happened here—at least, no one below the age of, say, 90—and who now wish they could wipe this place from their nation’s history, but can’t.

Those who keep putting their feet on one moral and ethical slippery slope after another, and those who lack the willingness to confront obvious evil, are in a very poor position to lecture anyone about Auschwitz—or any other scene of inhumanity and mass murder. What they ought to do is what people do while visiting this place: keep silent for a while, look around, and think.

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Terry Przybylski is a freelance writer in Chicago and its suburbs.

image Gate at Auschwitz proclaiming Work Makes Free