Auschwitz-Birkenau

A: Quantifying feelings and events is one of the challenges of writing. How to convey the roar of a waterfall or the spice of a meal can take a few revisions. I hunt for the right combination of little lexical lumps to paint a picture. Today, I'll test that art as I never have, for today C and I spent our time at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Krakow is pretty and the bus ride to the countryside evokes pastoral feelings while you see Polish farmers bail hay. It's not until your last few steps up to the Auschwitz gate that a respectful lump forms in your throat coming face to face with pallid reality. For unlike faux theme parked horrors and imaginary neighborhood haunted mansions - not more than my grandparents age ago millions looked upon this ground with a combination of entreaty, dread, and worse resigned fatalism on the way to their graves.

Human feelings and scope have a terrible issue. To think about a human being murdered is the fundamental subjective experience. You take all your personal loves, joys, plans, and hopes and imagine them coming to an uncaring and deliberate end - you shiver and return to the safety of the moment. Far away from your projection. But now a whole family dies - a mother and a wife, a father and a husband, a little boy. The trio are split as a man is pointed left and and the woman and boy right. It's explained through smiles and handing them towels that they're to be given food and comfort soon - imagine the man's horror are they're never seen again.

I look at a room - nothing more, nothing less, and there are scratches on the concrete walls. We look at an open septic latrine where jews hid in filth to avoid being worked to death. They stood in front of a wall before their end.

And so our minds stop - simply processing that many people, a room full, several rooms full, in fact the population of my home city of San Francisco and a few full football games - all perished. Each one was lied to through gates that promised "Arbeit macht frei" (Work brings freedom) and I'm ashamed to be human, grateful that my grandfather had the decency to kill whoever did this, selfishly thankful that my time came once it's all done.

Now, an open field, some train tracks, a wooden guard house, de-electrified fences, and me and C just kicking along a dirt road. An abyss of evil so great that it cannot be remedied. Simply you walk and look and learn.