the capacity to hate and the capacity to love. Which one we reach for
—our inner Hitler or inner ten Boom—is up to us.
* * *In the morning, we hire a cab to drive us the hour to Auschwitz. Béla
engages the driver in chitchat about his family, his children. I take in
the view I didn’t see when I was sixteen, when I approached
Auschwitz from within the dark of a cattle car. Farms, villages, green.
Life continues, as it did all around us when we were imprisoned there.
e driver drops us off, and Béla and I are alone again, standing
before my former prison. e wrought-iron sign looms: ARBEIT MACHT
FREI, work will set you free. My legs shake at the sight, at the memory
of how these words gave my father hope. We will work until the end
of the war, he thought. It will last for just a little while, and then we’ll
be free. Arbeit Macht Frei. ese words kept us calm until the gas
chamber doors locked around our loved ones, until panic was futile.
And then these words became a daily, an hourly irony, because here
nothing could set you free. Death was the only escape. And so even
the idea of freedom became another form of hopelessness.
e grass is lush. e trees have ĕlled in. But the clouds are the
color of bone, and beneath them the man-made structures, even the
ones in ruins, dominate the landscape. Miles and miles of relentless
fence. A vast expanse of crumbling brick barracks and bare rectangular
patches where buildings used to stand. e bleak horizontal lines—of
barracks, fence, tower—are regular and orderly, but there is no life in
this geometry. is is the geometry of systematic torture and death.
Mathematical annihilation. And then I notice it again, the thing that
haunted me those hellish months when this was my home: I can’t see
or hear a single bird. No birds live here. Not even now. e sky is bare
of their wings, the silence deeper because of the absence of their song.
Tourists gather. Our tour commences. We are a small group of