Europe 2011: What the Trip Taught Me

Three weeks. Three countries. Rothenburg to Warsaw, medieval walls to rebuilt cities, bratwurst in a Weimar market square to the ruins of gas chamber crematoria at Birkenau. I went on this trip as a twenty-one-year-old undergraduate taking a study abroad course called Literature of the Holocaust. I came back as someone who understood, more than I had before, why that literature exists and what it is trying to accomplish—and what literature cannot do, no matter how good it is.

I had a concentration in Holocaust and Genocide Studies. I had read Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, Art Spiegelman, Imre Kertész, and Anne Frank before the trip. I had written papers on survivor testimony and the historiography of the Final Solution. I thought I had some grasp of the subject. I was right that I had knowledge. I was wrong that knowledge and understanding were the same thing. They are not. Standing on the ground is different from reading about the ground, in ways I could not have predicted and still find difficult to fully articulate.

The Geography of Memory

The thing I did not expect was how completely the physical places would reorient everything I thought I knew. The cold inside the Birkenau barracks in May, when the air is still and there is no heat source in the building and the bunks run back into darkness, is different from knowing that the barracks were cold. The size of the camp at Birkenau—the way it continues past what the eye can follow in every direction from the main gate—is different from having read the acreage. The eight-kilometer road from Weimar through the beech forest to Buchenwald, and the fact that you can stand at the top of the Soviet Memorial and see the city below, is different from having read that the proximity was known and discussed.

Geography communicates what narrative cannot fully convey. A map of Auschwitz-Birkenau shows scale in a way that the number “1.1 million” does not, because a number is abstract and a map has dimensions. The view from the window of the Wannsee Conference House—the lake, the gardens, the light on the water—communicates the administrative normalcy of evil in a way that even Hannah Arendt’s writing does not fully prepare you for, because Arendt’s writing is words and the lake is there. You have to stand in these places. You have to see what was seen from these windows and walk the distance between these gates.

This is what bearing witness means, I think, when the witnesses themselves are gone. It means going to the places and making yourself be there. It means not substituting the comfortable abstraction of knowing for the discomforting physicality of the actual ground. I had been preparing for this trip for two years and I was still not ready for it, which is not an argument against preparation—it is an argument for going.

Culture Is Not a Vaccine

Germany required me to confront something I had believed without examining: that culture—literature, art, music, philosophy, education—makes people more humane. I had staked a significant portion of my education on this assumption, the way that English majors and humanities students often do. Reading and thinking about literature and art seemed self-evidently to produce something good in the people who did it.

Weimar was the city of Goethe and Schiller and the Bauhaus. Berlin had its concert halls, its universities, its philosophical traditions. Germany in the first decades of the 20th century was among the most educated, most culturally productive nations in Europe. And none of it prevented what happened. Goethe’s oak tree stood inside Buchenwald while 56,000 people died there. The Bauhaus typeface was inscribed on the camp gate by a Bauhaus-trained prisoner forced to design it. The same civilization that produced the Ninth Symphony produced the Wannsee Protocol.

The trip did not destroy my belief in the value of literature and culture. But it complicated that belief in ways that I have not been able to uncomplicate since. Literature can bear witness. It can preserve memory. It can make a reader feel something close to what a survivor felt, which is not nothing—that proximity of feeling is part of what makes testimony literature rather than just documentation. But it cannot prevent. It did not prevent. The Holocaust happened inside the most literate, most educated society in Europe. That is the fact I carry from Weimar and from Buchenwald, and it keeps the question of what literature is actually for open and uncomfortable, which is where I think it belongs.

The Persistence of Jewish Life

The trip was not only about destruction, and it is important to say so. The Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague represented seven centuries of continuous Jewish communal life—seven centuries of a community burying its dead in a small enclosed space because that was the only space permitted to them, and continuing, and persisting, and leaving a record of that persistence in stone. The Krakow JCC was a living institution, not a memorial, serving a community that had survived decimation and decades of communism and emigration and was still present. Synagogues stood in every city we visited, some of them in active use.

The Nazi project was not merely to kill; it was to annihilate—to eliminate not just the people but the culture, the memory, the community, the record of Jewish presence in Europe. That project failed. It destroyed enormously, killed six million people, and shattered a world that will never be reconstituted. But it did not achieve its stated goal. The gravestones in Prague are still standing. The Remuh Synagogue in Krakow is still in use. The JCC is still open. These are not triumphal observations—nothing about this is triumphal—but they are true, and they are part of the story that the sites tell, alongside the destruction.

What I Brought Home

I brought home photographs and notes and a reading list that has continued to grow in the years since. I brought home specific lessons that I can trace to specific places: that memorials are political acts, shaped by the ideological needs of whoever builds them, as the Soviet Memorial at Buchenwald demonstrated; that bureaucracy is one of the most effective instruments of mass murder ever devised, as the Wannsee minutes demonstrated; that individual choice persists even inside systems designed to eliminate it, as Schindler’s factory demonstrated.

And I brought home a question I have not been able to leave behind: what would I have done? It is easy to answer from the safety of the present. It is easy to be certain of your own virtue when the circumstances that tested everyone else’s virtue are seventy years in the past and you are standing in a museum looking at the evidence. Standing in those places—in the rooms where decisions were made, on the ground where the consequences of those decisions were enacted—the certainty dissolves. I cannot be sure what I would have done. I have met the descendants of people who chose various things, and I have read the testimonies, and I have stood on the grounds, and I still cannot be certain.

I think that uncertainty is necessary. It is what keeps the question from becoming a comfortable statement about other people in another time. The Holocaust was carried out by human beings who had the same range of human capacities that I have. Some of them chose to perpetrate. Some of them chose to comply. Some of them chose to resist at great cost. And most of them chose nothing—they went about their lives while it happened around them, which is also a choice. The question of what you would have done is not answerable from a distance. But it is answerable, or at least addressable, by how you behave in the present tense—by the choices you make when complicity is available and easier than resistance, and when the cost of resistance is real.

That is what the trip taught me. I have been working on it ever since.