Krakow 1

What once was the Kraków-Płaszów concentration camp has been burned to the ground and hidden by a rolling grassy landscape and only a few small signs, only cement foundations disguised by beer bottles and brush, only vast stretches of gravel that hint at mass graves, and only slabs of stone wedged into the ground would ever betray the late arbeitslager – a word that reduces mass violence, Nazis with moral platforms so dismantled that they shoot children before breakfast as a game, murder, bodies blasted apart, exposed sinews, cracked ribs, minds reduced to nothingness, blank stares, bodies so thin they no longer look human into a quotidian compound – and as I walked up the path hoping for a sign, anything, I thought that perhaps this place held the future, past, and present, and a power to remember us in this space and collect every detail that we notice, or that it has no memory at all and that knowing that nothing would be known was the source of my own internal bleeding, a lack of understanding that goes with the sense that a door in a nightmare has been flung open, only to reveal that nothing is what was expected and the horror is even greater than what was expected because what lies on the other side is nothingness and when I stared into the hollow eyes of commemorated survivors that stood at least thirty feet above me I was struck by a blood thinning terror, and a sense that even this moment I would not always remember and that our minds erode away even the most profound emotions, which lapse into oblivion rendering us hypocritical for suggesting that some things should always be remembered when in fact we cannot remember the overlapping, cannonading senses of helplessness, rage, and fear we feel in the instant we see something as shocking as a decrepit basement with bullet holes and names scratched in the wall as a last hail Mary to authenticate the humanity that was inherent to their bodies to Nazis who did not give a damn, when we see something as shocking as this place that has been erased, commemorated, and used for a picnic by aimless teenagers hoping that this beer will bring them a satisfying conversation in the deepening twilight juxtaposed to a lurking sense of the imminent specter of death.

Ariana Lee '15