Auschwitz, September 2019
The trip to Auschwitz-Birkenau delineated my life. As a storyteller I’m rarely at a loss for words and yet this is exactly what happened when I set foot in the concentration camp and the death camp. While we walked around and listened to our guide, I was overwhelmed by the denseness of these vast spaces where pain, torture and death had reigned. Everything I had read up to this point could not have prepared me for how the jagged ground would feel under each step. Nor would I have understood the absence of air – I could see wind moving through the poplar trees and yet I was struck by how little oxygen there was to breathe and there were only 18 of us in the group. It’s impossible to imagine what it would have been like for the tens of thousands that walked through these same paths holding their breath and then trying draw air in on a daily basis.
Auschwitz-Birkenau
I was one of 18 journalists invited to take part in a seminar run by the Auschwitz Museum (Sept 2019) on how to tell stories about Holocaust.
When the call was put out, I pitched one of the documentaries that I'm currently developing.
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As a storyteller, this was an invaluable experience that marked me in ways that will take years to unravel.
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Below is a sample of what I wrote when a colleague asked me to distill in one paragraph what I learned from this trip that no book could have taught me...
Birkenau, September 2019
Birkenau, September 2019
For the prisoners this was certain hell but for many others the camps were their place of work, a day-job. This vast machinery of death relied on all kinds of tradespeople and professionals, from pipe fitters to doctors. Most of us know about Mengele but there were other doctors who worked in Auschwitz-Birkenau. They were responsible for the daily selections of all incoming human cargo – immediate execution by gas or drawn out death through slave labour. Four doctors were part of the selection process. All of them would have taken the Hippocratic oath to ‘do no harm’. The idea of doctors doing this kind of work is beyond comprehension but this was just the tip of a more disturbing reality. The guide told us about an official piece of paper that was recovered cause it somehow was not burned. In the letter a doctor requests to be transferred from selection duty. The letter was stamped “APPROVED”. This doctor was not court martialed or killed. The guide went on to explain that the number of Nazis who faced the firing squad for not carrying out orders at Auschwitz-Birkenau was zero. Far from having a gun to their heads, their daily routine as cogs in the death machinery was accepted as a kind of norm fueled by Nazi dogma. This is perhaps one of the most horrifying things that sit with me from this trip to the concentration camp and death camp.
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koula bouloukos, documentary filmmaker
