I have sat down half a dozen times over the past couple of weeks to write something here. I even considered (briefly) writing a post while in the car on the way to Pennsylvania, but I would have had to do it on paper and then rewrite it here, and there are few things I abhor more than doing a job twice for no good reason.
Thusly.
I've also had some trouble because there were a lot of things I could have said, but nothing I really felt needed to be said. I've been in this weird mood, lately. Well, it's not weird to me - I've had it many times before. But a lot of people (or just the few I've allowed to experience it) find it disconcerting at the least. Personally, I kind of enjoy it. It's one of my more feisty-yet-fun-and-fancy-free moods. It only comes out one or two times a year, usually when I've been very stressed out and I'm just tired of putting up with everything.
The only thing I don't like about this mood is that I can be really annoying while in it. Also, my pet peeves are elevated to supreme annoyance levels.
Honestly, I'm amazed anyone hangs out with me at all.
Bah. Train of thought has yet again derailed.
I have vacation time now. I've been taking advantage of it, possibly more than I should, but it's addictive. It surprised me how much I really needed it. I went to PA with my parents, which was good, because PA is familiar and comfortable. If Ohio is my Nostalgia State and Indiana is now my Home State, Pennsylvania is definitely my Family State. I've been traveling to PA to visit family for as long as I can remember, so I guess it is only natural to associate the whole place with a feeling of comfort and safety. It's been so fantastic that so many churches in PA have shown an interest in my ministry. It just confirms the warmth I feel in my heart.
My dad is going to be very perturbed that I put this picture on here. But I had to! He was freaking out because Thaddeus Bear was looking at him.
Man, Pennsylvania should hire me to take promotional pictures for them.
It also doesn't hurt that my little corner of Pennsylvania happens to be quite close to several historic sites, including Civil War battlefields.
This pic combines two of my favorite things - large weapons and graveyards.
This cemetery doesn't seem big enough considering it's intended purpose.
Can't stand this pic - it was backlit and I didn't have six hours to wait for the sun to move. Grrr.... The other side came out great.
This seemed like a really small number to us, even counting the other two Unknown plots. Then we realized that the State plots had a lot of Unknown graves as well. So these were the guys that they couldn't identify by State or by name. Very sad.
This is one of my favorite spots at Gettysburg. (Did I forget to mention that's where I was? It should be obvious.) I spend a good portion of my time in Gettysburg on this ridge. Someday, I will work up the nerve to actually walk across the field.
This is a good spot to point out my sometimes conflicting views on the Civil War. We all have the benefit of hindsight, of course, but if you had asked my views of the conflict at the time, I would have been an ardent supporter of the Union. For those of you who believe we are still fighting this war, 1) Get over it, and 2) I am still proudly pro-Union. However, my reasoning now is vastly different from what it would have been in 1861. Had you asked me about secession then, I would have said it was an abomination, and that the South was just covering up the real reason for separation. Today, I still think the South was covering up the real reason for their actions, but I have a more open view on secession. NOT that I'm advocating it (not entirely), but I have a much less idealistic view of the federal government these days. I believe that there are many things that should be under the purview of the state, but the federal government has hijacked them.
Hmm... politics. That should get a reaction.
One thing I love so much about the Civil War is the huge number of weird coincidences and near misses. For this reason, I have always had a soft spot for Brigadier General Lewis Armistead. If you don't know his story, or why his actions on the third day of the Battle of Gettysburg are so significant, feel free to look it up. Or ask me. But I'll probably tell you to look it up.
There was something else I was going to talk about. A lot of things, actually. Suddenly, I can't remember them. Hmm...
Doesn't matter. I have a bunch of pics from Antietam as well, so I'll share them in the next post. I'm sure that one will be random as well.
I'm going to talk about the stage collapse at the State Fair. It's probably going to be controversial. I don't know. But it will be an honest reflection of how I feel.
I heard about the collapse the same way I hear about most of my news: Facebook. CNN is usually johnny-on-the-spot with breaking news, but short on facts for at least a half hour. So when I saw the blurb, I clicked the link, got confused because there was no attached story, and then started investigating further. Soon enough, other friends on FB started posting about it - either sending out prayers or attaching links to the news story. I learned what little I could Saturday night and then did what I always do when something like this happens. I said a prayer, closed my computer and went to bed.
There were more posts about it Sunday morning. I read a few as I was getting ready for church, but it seemed to be more of the same. I turned on the radio on my way to church - 92.3 WTTS - and realized that they were "playing them on." It was pretty much a concert of quietest rock songs playing for the victims and their families. And then the DJ started talking about the Red Cross, and how you could go to their website if you were trying to locate a loved one.
This was much bigger than I had thought.
I have never been to the State Fair. I have never really had a desire to go to the State Fair. The closest I will ever get is watching Rogers and Hammerstein's 1945 musical State Fair. It's safe to say that I am not personally invested in this type of social setting.
I had forgotten that a lot of people are.
So I did some more digging. It wasn't hard. All the local websites had news, WTTS has a page dedicated to what happened, and all the national news machines were covering the aftermath. Everyone was covering it from a different angle. The locals were covering it from the witness' point of view. One of the national agencies did a broad sweep of accidents similar to this in recent history. Yet another presented the story from Sugarland's (the band scheduled to play) point of view.
Then I saw the video.
It was innocuously attached to an article on the accident. I clicked it, thinking it was going to be some kind of interview with a witness, because surely, they wouldn't show tha-
Oh.
It got worse. Because I couldn't just watch it once. I watched it again. Trying to see how it started. Trying to hear what people were saying. Following individual people on the ground until they were covered by rigging and tarp.
It's sick.
A few weeks ago, there was a man who reached a little too far for a baseball thrown into the stands at a game. He died. There's a video of that happening that was NOT shown on the news.
So what makes this different? Because more people died? Because it was taken from a distance?
I can't wrap my head around it. Any of it.
My heart is heavy. I will continue to pray for the victims (and that's a whole other discussion) and their families.
But this is the last time I will talk about it.
(This was partially inspired by a blog from Pat Monahan of Train.)
We left the English camp on Saturday after the final party. It was a lovely drive to Krakow. When I was in Poland before, we went to Warsaw, which was fabulous, but I've been wanting to go to Krakow for a long time. Not only is it where Oskar Schindler's factory is located, but it is slightly more than an hour away from Oswiecim - or, as it is better known, -
Auschwitz.
I blogged a little bit of my experience there when I returned to the hostel in Krakow. At the time, though, I was still reeling from the sheer emotion of the place. If you read the post, it probably sounded like I was relatively unaffected. I talked about the weather and the logistics, but I never really said how it made me feel. There's a reason for that. A word of advice: don't go to a concentration camp the day before your trip ends. It took a great deal of effort to maintain that intellectual facade until I actually had time to process what I had seen.
This is probably one of the few posts that I will do containing a soundtrack. This is the music that was in my head while I walked the grounds of Birkenau and Auschwitz. The songs are from Schindler's List and The Pianist.
We started at Auschwitz II-Birkenau. Heinrich Himmler, commander of the SS, referred to Birkenau as the place of the "final solution of the Jewish question in Europe." Birkenau was constructed for the specific purpose of easing the burden on Auschwitz I, mainly through the means of extermination. 1.1 million people died in the camp, 90 percent of them Jews.
Looking in from the outside.
I think one of the most surprising things about Birkenau was just how few people we saw there. This was compounded when we went to Auschwitz I and encountered the hundred other people in our tour group. Honestly, it was almost a blessing. It's hard enough to think about what happened there - I really didn't need a ton of other people observing my sorrow.
On the other side of the wall. Most of the people who came through those gates never left - even when they were dead.
Looking back at the entrance from about halfway. The camp was divided between men and women, separated by the tracks.
Part of the remains of Crematorium II. There were eventually four crematoriums at Birkenau. They were demolished by the Nazis before the camp was liberated by the Soviets.
There are several of these pools around the crematoriums. I mentioned before that most prisoners didn't get to leave even when they were dead. Ashes were dumped in these pools, in the river behind the camp or were used as fertilizer for the surrounding fields.
There is a memorial between two of the crematoriums. It is a monument dedicated to everyone who lost their lives. Each stone represents a country that Jews were deported from to Auschwitz.
Part of the sewage plant. At one point, there were more than 90,000 prisoners at Birkenau. There were plans in place to expand the camp. Had the war continued, or the Germans won, it is impossible to determine how many more people would have been murdered.
Off in the distance, you can see the camp entrance. One of the reasons fewer people visit Birkenau is that so little of the camp has been preserved. Well, at least in some people's opinions. Most of the barracks were wood buildings, and many have collapsed. They've rebuilt some of them, but the fireplaces are all that exist of the rest. The crematoriums were also destroyed, and the only other thing still standing is the shower building. Still, I spent two hours there, and it wasn't nearly enough to grasp the scale of everything.
The barracks were designed to hold 52 horses. Instead, they housed up to 400 prisoners.
After Birkenau, we went to Auschwitz I, the original camp. Auschwitz was actually three main camps, including Auschwitz III-Monowitz. Monowitz was a labor camp primarily for IG Farben, but none of the buildings exist today. There were also 45 satellite camps connected to Auschwitz.
The main gate at Auschwitz. Arbeit Macht Frei: Work Makes You Free. When prisoners were first sent to the camp, they believed that maxim. This is not the original sign. You may recall that the original was stolen last year and cut into three parts. It has been recovered, but will likely never be put back over the gate.
The camp was originally a Polish army barracks.
Auschwitz started as a place to put political dissidents, mostly Polish prisoners and Soviet POWs. Gradually, more and more 'undesirables' were sent there, including gypsies and Jews. There were five other extermination camps, all in Poland, but most of the deported Jews were sent first to Auschwitz. They came literally from all over Europe.
In one of the buildings, there was a model of a crematorium. I'm not going to post the pictures of it. One of my constant internal battles was over whether or not to take pictures. On the one hand, it felt wrong to take pictures, like I was allowing evil to perpetuate. On the other hand, evil does perpetuate if men are not made to see what it leads to. People need to know what happened. The Holocaust was real. I came to the conclusion that it would be more wrong to give in to my personal discomfort than to let my pictures speak truth.
I'm going to tell you now, though. It only gets worse from here.
These cannisters held Zyklon B. Each one was used in the gas chambers.
There were two places where we were not allowed to take pictures. The first was in another room of this building. I was curious - everything we saw was horrifying, so what could be even worse that we were asked not to photograph it. The answer nearly made me vomit. The room was probably fifteen feet by seventy-five feet. I don't want to know how deep.
It was filled with human hair.
The Nazis had told the Jews that they were being relocated. So when the people were sent to Auschwitz, they brought their lives with them. And the Nazis stole everything. There is a room full of suitcases. A room full of toothbrushes. A room full of pots and pans. A room full of shoes. And a room full of hair.
The second place we weren't allowed to take pictures was the basement of Building 11. This was the building where the 'trials' would take place. It was also the building where people were tortured. Just because. There are three types of rooms in the basement: Standing cells, where four men would be placed in a square foot of space overnight with no recourse but to stand; Starvation cells, where prisoners were given neither food nor water until they died; and Dark cells, airtight rooms where prisoners were kept until they used up all the oxygen in the room.
I didn't want to take pictures of any of those.
Right next to Building 11 was the Death Wall. Once their trial was over, prisoners were taken to the wall, told to kneel, and then shot in the back of the head. Thousands were executed at this wall.
Thousands more were killed here. This crematorium was built as a test - it is the model for the crematoriums that were built at Birkenau, though those were larger. It is essentially three rooms. In the first, people were stripped and told that they would have a shower. In the second, they were gassed. In most cases, it took less than fifteen minutes. In the third, their bodies were stuffed into furnaces and burned.
I hesitated here more than anywhere when taking the photo. Death permeates the walls. It doesn't take much imagination to hear the cries of the thousands of terrified people who were murdered so efficiently. Ghostly fingers scrabble at your skin, pulling your hair, each touch demanding justice. Each silenced voice begs for the chance to make himself known.
By the time I reached this point, I was feeling very unChristian. Rudolf Höss, the first commandant of Auschwitz, was hanged on these gallows on April 16, 1947. They are right next to the crematorium. I was reminded a little of how I felt when I heard Osama bin Laden had been killed. I have to confess, though, that I felt no remorse at all over the death of Höss. His house was maybe 200 feet from the chimneys of the crematorium. At Nuremberg, he bragged that he had killed 3 million Jews. No. I felt no remorse for him.
I felt guilty. How does something like this happen? How do so many people look the other way? How do you reach a point where genocide seems like a viable option?
Oddly enough, the only question I never asked was why? I never asked God how He could let something like this happen. I know the answer. God didn't put those people there. God gave His Son for them. But He didn't just die for the prisoners. He died for the SS. Do you know how hard it is to accept that? We tell ourselves all the time that there is no difference between a big sin and a little one. But we don't believe it. We look at our lives, and we tell ourselves, "Well at least I never killed someone. At least I didn't steal. At least I didn't rape."
And yet... I see a place like Auschwitz, and I realize just how little it would take to actually reach that point. All of those people who lived near the camps, who told the Allies they had no idea what was happening less than a mile away... We are those people. We live next door to sin. We like to party with sin on the weekend. We like to dip our toe in, just to see what the fuss is all about. But at least we don't go all the way.
All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
I know, I know. We've passed it's time and have moved on to really? she's going to make me read about her trip now? that is so four weeks ago! (When I started this post, four was two.)
Well, in the (paraphrased) words of one of the characters on the newest show I've started, you have now been rerouted to the office of Too Frickin' Bad.
I mean that in the nicest way possible.
Yes, at long last, you have come to the gigantic post about my trip to Poland. As you may have noticed from the title, however, this is indeed only part one. Part two will deal exclusively with Auschwitz.
So, Poland. You should know by now that Europe is one of my favorite places in the world. I love the feel of it, I love the people, I love the history - honestly, it feels like coming home whenever I go to Europe.
Poland, however, has been something of a sore subject with me. I went there the first time in 2006, and to be perfectly frank, it was not the best trip I've taken. There were a lot of factors that fed into that, but it's fair to say that my memories of my time there were somewhat tainted by the events of that trip.
I was really excited about this trip, though, mostly because I felt like it would somehow redeem the country in my mind. I felt at peace about my decision to participate, but within a few days of making that decision, I really felt like I was under attack. I know I posted a little bit of how I was feeling on here, but it really was unlike anything I've experienced before.
Before I left, though, I felt like I was in a good place spiritually and emotionally, which was a good thing, because this was one of the hardest trips I've taken.
I have to be careful here. I don't know who might be reading, and I don't want certain people to get the wrong impression. I loved this trip. I love the people who went on this trip. I love the people I met.
But I was dealing with a lot that I didn't mention at the time.
How much do I say?
We'll see.
The primary reason for the trip was the English camp run by Arek and Donna Delik in Kutno.
It's a wild and crazy week of classes and games and lots of ice cream. I taught a class on journalism to about 60 kids (divided into four groups). We covered a lot of material (too much), including a bit of photojournalism.
Needless to say, all of the groups were very unique.
As was the team. (I look really stupid in that picture. Like most things, there is a story behind that.)
(I have a ton more pictures on Facebook that will give you a more rounded view of the trip.
It WAS a good trip. And it did redeem Poland. I don't want you to get the wrong idea because of what I said before. My issues are my own. These are people I will never forget.
This is a country that will always be in my heart.
Really, what more can you ask?
I realize this post didn't really explain much of anything about my trip, but it's actually a lot more than I was originally going to share. It's amazing what wounds time can heal.
