Notebooks: Research Notes: Places
Auschwitz-Birkenau
Introduction
Most of the material in this section was written and made in 2006 shortly after my visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau, at the start of my MA in Contemporary Art.
For many years I'd wanted to visit this place; to see for myself the scene of one of history's most protracted and calculated atrocities. Some would ask 'why'?' Why would anyone want to see such a place? To me it was obvious; I am a human being and human beings died there: over a million of them.
Like most others, I'd read books, seen films and watched countless documentaries on the subject of The Holocaust, but until I walked in the shadow of Birkenau's infamous gatehouse (and, in the case of Auschwitz I, beneath the gate with it's cynical aphorism 'Arbeit Macht Frei' wrought above) I knew these words and images (contemporaneous photographs, biographies, films and modern-day dramas) would remain, in my experience at least, divorced from reality. That is not to say - and this is important - unreal or untrue (already we begin to see the inadequacies and often the inappropriateness of language when confronted with such a subject ) but rather unimaginable (and again, this word is quite insufficient).
Even now, although I've been there and walked around the camp, seen the mouth of the gatehouse, the barracks and the ruins of the gas chambers, I still can't imagine (and never will I be able to imagine) what it was like to be there. But I have been there, and these words - unlike those which are, as I've said, so often inadequate when trying to describe such a place - articulate perfectly a position from which I am at least able to understand a little better the predicament of the countless numbers of victims of Auschwitz-Birkenau.
I have been there.
These four words, are words which over a million people were never able to speak. To have been there would imply that such a time was behind them. I left the camp the way in which I entered, and beyond its barbed-wire fence and watchtowers, my life is now forever set in stark contrast to their deaths.
I can never know what it was like to be there, just as they could never know what it was like to leave.