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gravity

what was that?

The industry of it all. The tourism of it all. The capitalism of it all, the marketing of it all, the israel of it all. The gas chambers of it all, the photography of it all, the white women of it all. All those people shuffling in and out of those buildings for the last almost century has given the place a totally new life. It’s a different place now than it ever was. So much energy has passed through those halls. Now, it’s more what it is now than what it was then. It feels more like a place where we are now than a place where they were then. And I was expecting that it would feel like

a place where they were then.

Seeing that sign at the front that says work will make you free, that was the gravest moment. It was different in my head. I don’t know how to have this conversation, and I’m sure that’s by design. There’s not really any room for discourse beyond “it was really devastating, and it was very solemn to be there.” It’s just a dangerous game to play to even begin to talk about it.

A van picked us up

from our Airbnb. A man named a████. Two aging Gen X couples in the van, one of them seemingly american, the other australian or perhaps kiwi or perhaps british. The driver stopped at a gas station along the way. I made myself pee and walked around a little garden. I saw an ant crawling on a sign with a bunch of polish words on it, next to a little teeter totter with dog faces on it. █████ got coffee. The drive was about an hour and a half. I looked out the window, thinking about who knows what, because isn’t it true that those moments of silent reflection looking out car windows can lead to thought patterns that are much harder to access in any other state of mind? We arrived. The façade was brutalist. The tour buses and vans and cars went as far as the eye could see. Everyone was there. I felt like I was at Disney world. There was a little galley toward the end of the tour where they hagnged some of the SS soldiers after the liberation. There was a gas chamber. There was a sign inside that said that thousands of Jewish people were killed in here and please show resepct and also don’t light any candles. There was a big mountain of shoes——more like two mountains——two and a half mountains——which were blackened, perhaps by fire. There was a mountain of hair, a mountain of prosthetics and mobility devices, and a mountain of suitcases with people’s names on them. There were hundreds of photos of people who were killed at the camps. There were people with israeli flags draped over their shoulders. There was a room with books on display, books written by survivors in the decades following the Holocaust. The public has always been fascinated by their stories, and I share that fascination, of course. I read man’s search for meaning, I read night by elie viesel, I read the diary of anne frank, I watched schindler’s list, I willingly woke up at seven in the morning, still jet-lagged, to get picked up and shuttled to the place. It’s perfectly understandable why we would be fascinated by it all, and perfectly understandable, and even reasonable and necessary, for survivors to have written about their experiences. Where I take issue is where I am always going to take issue, and that is where capitalism perverts it all. Survivors were turned into products, commodified. Capitalism perverted the history, as it perverts everything. And now, genocide of Palestinians. Never again, but it's happening again. It comes back to an end to capitalism and an end to colonialism/imperialism, with imperialism being the highest stage of capitalism. When you turn everything into a product, you will eventually turn the land itself into a product. You will see it as something that can be owned, something to which you can be entitled. And then: more genocide. Never again, though, right? right