The Innocent Sky

"When you say they died at the end of March, it gives you a feeling that they died just before liberation. So maybe if they'd lived two more weeks?"
"Well, that's not true anymore. [Nonetheless] It was horrible. It was terrible. And it still is."
"In view of this, the date of their death is more likely to [have] be[en] sometime in February. The exact date is unknown."
Erika Prins, researcher, Anne Frank House museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands

There is a playground, a park. Mothers are there with their infants in strollers, under a sea of blue sky, sun blazing above. There are people out walking their dogs. This is the village of Oswiecim, also known as Auschwitz. There is also a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet located there, for the convenience of people enjoying a beautiful day, an hour west of Krakow, Poland. A typical village day, with people enjoying an early spring landscape.

A short walk away there are bookshops, cafes, and ... memorial shops. And if you're surprised by all that in this grave place of bleak and horrible memories, you will be reminded by your guide not to think of those shops as purveyors of souvenirs. What one can purchase is a 'memorial' item, definitely not a souvenir adjacent to the place where an iron gate reads Arbeit Macht Frei, a cruel joke played on millions of people who hadn't, at first, any idea that they would never be free again.

"Auschwitz was a death factory", states your guide, just in case you weren't fully aware of the purpose of the place you had entered. One of the grimmest places on Earth, in fact. Where Nazi Germany inflicted death on up to ten thousand people daily, where over a million Jews had been murdered in this one of many Third Reich death camps.

But if the sky is blue, then the birds will be singing.

The Auschwitz Album -- Women and children being taken through sector BII of the camp to Crematoria IV and V. In Birkenau, elderly women and children were almost always immediately sent to their deaths in the gas chambers as they were deemed "unfit for work"

There are orderly streets, and one building after another in this stark place of memory. In Block No.4 you will find a silent display of human hair; braids, curls, dark hair, blonde hair, straight hair, wavy hair. when the camp was liberated seven thousand kilograms of hair was found in storage. Human hair was used by the Germans of the day to stuff decorative cushions. If novelties interest you, human skin was also used to bind books; nothing was wasted; human bones were used to produce soap.

Elsewhere, prayer shawls can be found in abundance, along with piles of suitcases, of eyeglasses, of baby clothes. Step outside one building before entering another and a brief reprieve from being a witness to history will allow you to confront the beauty of that clear blue sky; what could ever go awry under such a sky, with the sun floating in the atmosphere high above, blessing Earth with the miracle of life?

The Auschwitz Album -- Jews who were classified as "not fit for work" waiting in a grove outside Crematorium IV before they were to be gassed. At this point, the Jews were exhausted and in a state of shock from the horrors of the journey and the selection process that they had just endured. The vast majority had no idea what fate awaited them.

Those who are affected by what they see to the very depths of their souls may find comfort in thinking that the spirits of the departed, the children in particular, sing now from the full-throated enthusiasm of birds appreciating the approach of spring. Perhaps they would be represented by the unspeakable number of children of all ages whose lives were extinguished in those death camps. Like Anne Frank, at age 15, a girl who believed in  hope, in a better tomorrow.

Her tomorrow remained beyond sight, beyond hearing, beyond touch; an illusion of hope which death vanquished. She died at Bergen-Belsen. It had always been thought that she and her sister Margot may have died mere weeks before liberation. New research, however, claims that not to have been the case. While Bergen-Belsen was liberated on April 15, 1945, and Anne had evidently perished from typhus in February.

Perhaps when she died the sky was blue, but one doubts the birds were singing.