On Cameras and Crematoria

The evolution of the camera, in short: cameras went from the cumbersome big, boxy, bellowy things that had to be supported on tripods and allowed long periods of exposure; to increasingly smaller and faster devices that could be hung around one's neck and adjusted on the fly with two hands; to computerized, palm-sized wafers that can be cupped small and light as a sparrow, operable with only two fingers.

As the camera changed, so too did photography and the photograph. In the early days of large format cameras, taking a photograph (well) required knowledge of both light and lens, and patience adjusting for each. Photographers (good ones) treated each exposure meticulously, striving for excellence in image and economy of materials. Time spent preparing the photograph was time saved in the darkroom.

As cameras moved from tripod to hands, some of the photographer's manual considerations -- such as balancing the appropriate aperture and shutter speed to the amount of available light reflecting off the subject -- were automated by innovations like the built in light-meter and push-button zoom. As the technology advanced, picture-takers, needing to know less about the physics of photography, were liberated to point-and-shoot. 


But even though the camera liberated the photographer it didn't liberate the photograph; film still had to be purchased and photos had to be processed, generally at some expense. Unless one one had the luxury of wastefulness, photographers weighed the value of each exposure. If you were going to spend $10, $15, $20 developing a role of film into prints, you were going to exercise some level of judgment and selectivity about what you shot and why.

When the digital camera liberated both photographer and photograph; when everything apart from choosing the subject became the province and provenance of the camera's brain; and when photographs, rendered in pixels, ceased to exist as anything that had a materials/cost limitation, people were then totally free to shoot what they wanted, when they wanted, as often as they wanted. 

And so today, with the advent of the inexpensive digital camera, we have people taking pictures almost indiscriminately, even on the slightest hunch that there might be something worthwhile in them upon further review. The strategy seems to be; shoot first, determine value later.

As this mindset has taken increasing hold over the camera-bearer, there has been a parallel distancing between being-in-the-moment, and mining-the-moment-for-some-future-being, as though the photos destined for viewing later on will be of more value than the actual standing before or inside the very thing the camera has digitized.

Hence, I report back from Auschwitz with disappointment -- if it isn't sinful for me to say that I am disappointed in a museum predicated on exposing the horrors of the holocaust. I was disappointed both with what I saw happening outside me (some of which I participated in myself) as well as for what I didn't see happening inside me, and perhaps others. I anticipated a powerful experience; in truth, the place had some power, but far less than I had expected it would.

In fairness, my response to Auschwitz was undermined by the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, which I had visited several years ago. There, in DC, I saw some of the same ghastly "artifacts" -- mountains of eyeglasses, suitcases, human hair, and shoes -- as were exhibited behind glass in Auschwitz. When I first laid eyes upon those artifacts in DC, particularly the shoes, I was greatly upset: nothing symbolized the end of the line so definitively as the forfeiture of shoes. Perversely, perhaps, I would have been happy to have been greatly upset seeing those shoes in Auschwitz, as well. But I wasn't, and that frightens me a little. Nor was I much moved by many of the other exhibits and remains.

My lack of emotional response was not wholly owing to a callous heart. Auschwitz, as a high volume museum resists emotion, in part because it strives toward exhumation and memorialization, and in part because the hordes of people who attend each day become human wedges between the museum and any hope of intimacy. Over a million people a year travel to the little Polish town of Oświęcim to visit Auschwitz, and they, too, come with expectations. The want to learn; they want to see; and, they want to be jarred, horrified. 


However, jostled is not jarred, and because of the daily influx of visitors Auschwitz is crowded, teeming, and in order to see the exhibits one must often gently elbow their way up front, then to be gently nudged from behind. There is a constant slow churning at each exhibit, and it is only twenty or thirty seconds looking at the mound of shoes taken from infants and toddlers, or the mountain of pots and pans, before the intakers begin to feel the breath of others. To remain is to overstay, is to take more than you are entitled to. 


So visitors become part of a single lava flow from one exhibit to the next, from one building to the next, moving in a steady, orderly, forward progress. Regrettably, along the way there is no defined space or time for reflection. Yes, it's possible that some reflection occurs in the in-between of exhibits, but it's equally likely that one concentrates more on the shuffling of the crowd and care taken toward neither stepping on nor having stepped on feet than on the resonances of the fading exhibit.

The crowds, then, made it very hard for me to connect. I was one among the cattle. But it wasn't just the numbers that put layers between me and an emotional connection. Too, it was the ubiquitous and unrelenting presence of the digital camera and its ubiquitous and unrelenting pops of light. 


I don't mean to suggest that people shouldn't take pictures of the exhibits -- I took a few. Especially given that no one really had the luxury of lingering, it's easy to see how someone would want to take a photo, perhaps to later recapture a sense of what they first saw when they first saw it. 


But there were some who took pictures of everything, not reflectively but reflexively, as though going to a museum, any museum, even Auschwitz, was to go on a photographic safari to bag and tag images whose value will be assessed back at the computer. On these safaris everything has potential meaning, not necessarily because the photographer "sees" something, but rather because the camera can capture it at no cost or sacrifice. Perhaps if their digital cameras didn't come with memory cards capable of storing hundreds of thousands of images those people would be a little less trigger happy. Maybe I should have been able to block them out, but I didn't. Instead, I got pissed.

There was another strange camera occurrence: people taking pictures of others posing in front of an instrument or remnant of barbarism. A posing woman, leaning against a cement pillar of a barbed wire fence, lifting a heel against is as if standing coyly under a street lamp; or a guy having his picture taken in front of one of the ovens, and then taking the same picture of his friend who'd taken it of him -- this inside an actual gas chamber. Maybe it is their way of bearing witness; and maybe it is not. All I know is that I found it impossible to feel a sense of holiness at Auschwitz, in Auschwitz. There was neither time nor space nor demeanor.

But Auschwitz is only the first of the death camps in Oświęcim. Birkenau (Auschwitz II), the much bigger camp, designed for death after Auschwitz had only been improvised for it ("Auschwitz," or Auschwitz I proper, was Polish military barracks commandeered by the Nazis and retrofitted for torture, diabolical medical experiments, death), is situated 3km away, and one must take a shuttle bus to it from Auschwitz. Though Birkenau is where most of the exterminations took place, Auschwitz is where the museum is located. And where Auschwitz stands virtually intact (or has been restored to appear so), Birkenau is in ruins. A wasteland

Very few of the people who toured Auschwitz as part of my group followed on to Birkenau. It had been raining off and on all day. Never heavy, but sometimes steady. Umbrellas opened and closed, opened and closed. It might have been the weather that held visitors back at Auschwitz. But is also might have been that Birkenau doesn't offer much explicit history: Auschwitz busily documents the enormity of Nazi crimes; Birkenau quietly documents the immensity of those crimes. 


Getting off the bus, standing outside the barbed wire fence, able to peer out to the camp's extremities owing to the destruction of most barracks, I was struck by the camp's vastness, its reach. Within its barbed wire perimeter, Birkenau goes on and on. Prior to my visit I had seen Birkenau in pictures and film; standing there outside it, taking in its full panorama, dwarfed all previous notions of it.  


There was little to photograph, and much to photograph. The watchtower, Birkenau's imposing maw, remains. So too do the tracks on which daily transport trains, fifty boxcars long, slowed, squealed, stopped. And the 1500 foot long path on which the overwhelming majority disembarking those trains walked their final breathing minutes en route to the gas chambers/crematoria awaiting them at the end of those 1500 feet. I took that walk. I was eerily aware of each footfall. 


At path's end, I walked up to the subterranean gas chambers, where Zyklon B snuffed the lives, wholesale. Now existing only as gaping holes in the ground, little by little the earth is reclaiming them. 


The adjacent crematoria, however, the buildings which housed the ovens which burnt the evidence of mass murder, they remain, though in piles of brick rubble and twisted metal tendons. The Nazi's, fearful of these smoking guns, destroyed the four crematoria before fleeing the advancing Russian army. 


Nearby stand a handful of barracks -- barren of life and light -- the not-so-long-ago way-stations of those who, no longer able to hang on, slipped from from useful to flammable. Structures beyond the comprehension of the young, barrack walls bear the etches and gouges of hormonal youth.


As I think back upon the two camps, Birkenau offered less to know, but more to imagine. To imagine the human density of those cattle cars which pulled in daily, and then, to imagine how swiftly thereafter their human cattle had been sorted, gassed, incinerated, and turned into ash.


And to imagine their walk, the walk that the too old, and too young, and too maternal, and too crippled took along those rails which lead to the then still standing brick buildings with their imposing though seemingly benign smoke stacks, and to imagine what might have been going through their minds with each hurried, Nazi-prodded closing step. Why have we been separated? Why are we going in this direction, when others are not? Why is that soldier standing there smiling as he blows cigarette smoke skyward? 


At their peaks the crematoria were capable of combusting 9000 bodies a day. The gas chambers were apparently capable of more. As the trains eventually disgorged victims in excess of what the ovens could cinder, overflow corpses were hauled from the gas chambers, tossed in a ditch, and burned en masse in the open air.  


The mass murder was cut short at three years. By the time the Russians liberated Birkenau, over a million people, 960,000 of whom were Jews, had been turned into ash.


I took pictures of their cemetery.