apuseni
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magic north
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the angel of death
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winter decorations of my town - this is what you get if there is no snow: Electric, fake snowflakes.. but still quite pretty
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Behind stage - what happened between Auschwitz, Poland and my 23rd birthday - in 2 weeks time

I’ve climbed the stairs and then stopped at the door listening at the voices inside the house… I lighted a candle in the support near the door, outside, while listening, breathless, to the voice of the priest inside the house hallway … I didn’t new if I should entered or not.. ..Would I disturb the ceremony by entering?… I was imaging that the priest and all the rest were staying in the door, inside, and if I would have opened it I would have hit them…

Finally I open the door of the hallway and slowly I entered the house… the priest was at the other end of the hallway, near the head of my grandma …the rest of the people – not too many, we didn’t want at all a large ceremony, were along the sides of the coffin…I entered and I stopped in the door.. my aunt, my mothers’ older sister, gave me a lighted candle to hold in my hands while listening to the priest…

I was looking at my grandma that was lying in the coffin… the coffin was covered inside with white linen which had beautiful laced edges that were coming out the coffin …..at the corners of the coffin there were candles that were burning silently…. She was looking really calm like sleeping.. I had the impression all through the ceremony that she is really sleeping…. that I was expecting any moment to see her chest move in the rhythm of breathing… Are we doing a mistake? Is she still living??? … but then why would she had stayed in the hallway on the table, in the coffin for 2 nights?

The hallway is a big room, with a large bookcase on one side and a large wardrobe on the other side. The coffin was placed in the middle of the room on the table that usually stays in the dinner room. It smelled like burning incense, pine or mirth from Greece.

The atmosphere, though really silent, didn’t seemed heavy, people were looking pretty calm and serene.... they might have thinking that they will also be like that one day…. or they might have thought how long my grandma lived – 92 years old…

The ceremony was long and boring.... it was nice but it didn’t really touch me and it seemed that nor are others – obviously they were thinking to other things…

Finally it ended and we had each to pass and present our tribute to my grandma… we had to make a cross and kiss her hand…. It seemed all natural…. As advanced creatures on the stairs of evolution we present our honors and we respect our deaths…..
I went straight ahead and stretched my head and kiss her hand, but in that instant, when closing my lips to her hand, my nose felt the smell of decaying…. a sweet smell that undoubtedly, everyone will realize what it is, though not necessarily they know what cause it…

In 2 nights my grandma, who all her life was a fighter started to decay….her body, already shrunken by 92 years of life was starting to decompose…92 years – she died very soon after her 92nd birthday – which was on November 13th 1913.

After the ceremony was ready we raised the coffin on our shoulders to carry it down the stairs to the car, the coffin though was looking massive was unexpected heavy…really heavy… I’ve thought my grandma had suddenly become heavier than she was in her last years…for this I guess the lid of the coffin was first carried to the car, before the coffin itself.

The stairs of my house are steep and in spiral just like the stairs of an 150 years old house from the historic center of town…There was not too much space for the coffin - it was too long… we had to be struggle quite a lot…at some point my grandma started to slide in the coffin… someone upstairs had said: “Look she is sliding…” half amazement, have worried… then I looked above the coffin, because until then I was under it carrying it on my shoulders, and again I had felt the smell…I couldn’t stop thinking that it is horrible… I turned my head and tried not to smell anymore…

We finally arrived downstairs… on the long hallway out of the building I asked my older cousin if we shouldn’t cover her face…He said he doesn’t know… I thought that anyway it doesn’t matter if we should or shouldn’t…. to leave her face for everyone to see was too much….she should have her respect…..and people who would see a coffin in the street, open and the face of the person inside will never have the respect for that person…. just like you would see a dead dog in the street.. .. I covered her face with the linen.

I have to write here that on the hallway out of the building I was thinking that is really disrespectful to leave the content of the coffin visible… It was like a sacrilege to death itself… and this is because people look inside and once they touched with their eyes things are becoming for them demystified and superficial – ready to laugh at or present disrespect for. Just like when we are watching inside a galaxy and we can see all the processes that are taking place there, though until then we only imagined or not even imagined what it is there inside.
I whished the lid was in place, to cover the white linen and my grandma, and not in car.

When we left the street, in the car, we could see that the sun started to shine – that means that my grandma was happy for passing this life.

At the cemetery the same cloudy and dull weather was back. It was cold and wet, it was muddy…We stop the car and we putted the coffin on a chariot… we went to the grave and laid the coffin down on the bottom… the earth was shoveled back in the grave…and we all went back….

Was she still alive??, i was wondering on the way home, and several days after and even now sometimes…..why have we buried her in that ugly, cold and muddy cemetery?
Is this the place were we all going to end? Is this how we all going to end?

I don’t want that.

Auschwitz

A November morning with snow and fog, a crowded train…I leave Krakow for a one day trip to Oswiecim the small Polish city were for about 5 years between 1939 -1945 the Auschwitz concentration lager was functioning.

I visit first KL - Koncentration Lager Auschwitz no.1. here are many tourists who are crowding in to enter. The entrance building, was initially the concentration camp admission block. Nowadays you can find presented a short history of the camp along with all the touristic items like maps, booklets and postcards with crematoriums. I hurry to the exit and i enter, together with a crowd of japaneese tourists in the camp site…the alleys are muddy. They are only covered with gravel and ice form the frost during the night, that was now melted by houndreds of steps that walked before - like a constant reminder of the other milions of steps of people who died there. We soon reach the main gate above which you can read: “Arbeit macht frei” – “Freedom through work”…. tourists are moving in masses … they are sticking to each other like they are looking for each other support and council…..there are many tourists: Japanese, English, Polish, Germans….I don't want to stick on them....i want to feel the site all by myslef without being influenced by any other person....The camp is made of around 25, 2 floored buildings with basements – all having the same structure and all placed in 3 rows, which were adapted to the needs - most of them were common bedrooms…

The middle row of blocks are nowadays hosting permanent exhibitions of some of the countries from which Jews, Roma people, and many other identities were taken away and put in the concentration camp…. I had seen represented here Hungary, Slovakia and Czech Republic, Belgium, as well a block dedicated to all Jews and their struggle for freedom, and a block for Roma people that dissapeared..…

The row in the back of the camp was sheltering the block were experiments were done on women and children, the “Death Block” as well the “Execution Wall” and other blocks were permanent exhibition are presented.

The basement of the "Death Block" was divided in several rooms. One of them had no window, except a very small hollow in wall. Another one was divided in 4 very small cells of about 50cm square. In the first room is supposed that people died because of lack of oxygen - it was called "Suffocation room". The second one they were obliged to enter through a very tinny door at the lower part of the cell, and stand for hours or days – most of the time the cell was occupied by more than one person.

Both rooms had neither windos or light, nor sewerage, nor air, nor straws or any other furniture was covering the concrete floor.... the suffocation room was painted black.... they seemed the expression of emptiness and cruelty....

I will not describe the other buildings I had visited, like the one where nazi were making sterylisation experiments on Jewish women and in which i can't remember if i had entered or not.... or the one showing the day to day life of prisoner…..

I will stop to the most touching one that was showing the proves of extermination: tens of thousands of shoes, of trunks and other luggage on which addresses were written with chalk or on smaller or larger thickets, of metallic frames for glasses, of handicap prosthesis like artificial legs and arms… were exposed to the eyes of tourists….a room was showing women hair that nazi was using for their textile and furniture industry… a huge room was showing tin dishware ….all of these were proves of the life of the people there in the camp…. everything was still but you could smell the things... they were still living....

I left the last row of blocks and I felt empty on the inside …

I wanted then to go to the crematoriums.. on the way there I had passed the Polish block which I had not visited from the first time … I entered and … I couldn’t stop my tears… so many lives…for nothing… the Polish people were simply smashed by the German troops, they fought by they lost and with their lost it followed 5 years of terror and extinction….

Polish people was the second most exterminated nation after Jews in concentration camps...

On the way to the crematoriums, ……funny i've realised on the way from the Polish block to the crematoriums that I was passing the same alleys so many others had passed to their death, or to their despair to work carrying bodies to burn, I was passing the high voltage wired fences..…. they seemed so strange, so unreal, so well ordered…everything was designed in the smallest details…. like a well functioning, giant, death machine…..

The crematorium is half buried in the ground: it was initially an ammo depot, but its destination had changed. … there were 2 main rooms: the room were they gas people and the room were the bodies were burned…… the room I think was never painted again after the war ended….the walls were black…it was only concrete….In the room near the gas chamber there were 2 burning furnaces, …that were used to burn the corpses….flowers were laid on the metallic structure that was meant to push the corpses in the furnaces… a tribute to those lost… I asked myself if the people putting the flowers had someone who died there and was burnt, and if yes – and is most probably, how could they had the strength…..

I went then to Auschwitz 2 or Birkenau which is 4 - 5 times larger than Auschwitz 1. Here there were 4 crematoriums with their gas chambers attached. There are no blocks anymore like in Auschwitz 1 but barracks that were initially designated for 50 horses then modified to shelter 1000 prisoners… in time the camp extended so that in the end being the largest extinction camp, the biggest death machine..…it comprised 300 buildings from which only 45 barracks of brick and 22 of wood had survived almost intact after nazi tried to blow thenm up to cover the extinction traces .....

The alleys were again muddy.. i imagine the same conditions were during the times when it was still functioning…..it was cold and over the large camp, that resembled like a large field surrounded by barbed wire, fog started to lie down…the observation posts along the main ramp, which was passing through the middle of the camp and was connecting in straight line the main gate with the crematoriums 2 and 3 (the first one is in Auschwitz 1), were looking amazingly vivid…..

The main ramp was the places were the trains from all over the world were ending their trip and the unloading of people was done – this was the last station for around 1.1 million Jews, 150.000 Poles, 23.000 Roma, 15.000 soviet political prisoners and other people had been passing on that ramp, either to the crematoriums – which were at the end of the ramp, either to the barracks – which were along the ramp.
The crematoriums are now ruins…. 3 of them were blown up by nazi at the end of the war, in a desperate act of covering the traces of mass killing…..the 4th one was partially destroyed by a revolt of Jews prisoners at the beginning of October 1944….

People who got selected to go to the crematoriums, the selection was done on the ramp, were they told that they will have a shower before entering the camp…. the crematoriums were made mainly of 3 rooms – most part of the structure was half buried, in the first room the prisoners were descending were told to undress… shoes had to be knotted together not to get lost, as well clothes and other personal belongings had to be distinctively placed so that they could find them easily after “showers”… after they were undressed they entered the gas chamber but instead of water they were gassed…..people died … they were then clean up – by other prisoners, to the furnaces to make room for other prisoners… the cycle was repeating… is it true that in the days when the furnace was working full time the smoke was carrying the people’s ashes outside?? Like a last cry for freedom and elevation of souls, of hopes, fears, were all the concerns faded… and nothing counted anymore….The smoke was caring the people’s ashes ….

Rain of ash was falling down….

These places should be sacred… we shouldn’t neither touch them nor walk inside…. We should not touching the handles, the gates, the doors, the things – furniture, bars, anything, not stepping and walking were so many souls had found their end… Even the air should not be breath … the place itself is living, is living by the people who had been there and died…

There should be scaffolds and catwalks above the ground to enter these places, and these catwalks should have glass walls….not even the air to be touched… there were people taking photos of themselves in front of the crematoriums….how is this possible……

These places are living…though anything there seems dead, anything there is alive…. millions of people are living there…..Millions of people whom only guilt was that they were born: Jews, Polish, Roma, Gay, or because they were having different views than nazi.

And for those who are still discriminating against, invite them to Auschwitz….. Look at the Polish situation against gay people which is taking place as we speak in many cities around Poland…. The anti-gay protestors were shouting “Gas the gay!” and “Send lesbians to Auschwitz!”… how is this possible?.... How have we came back to this…in the very Poland…..
Auschwitz should be a lesson for tolerance for all, because if we forget history we are ought to repeat it again and again…

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The end

I am writing again of my grandma, but now I will write about her death…. she died while I was returning from Poland, Sunday evening at 10. It is strange how I still feel her presence now even if we went to burry her…

I feel a strange anguishing feeling, I feel like we have done something bad burring her. I blame myself for leaving her in the cold, wet cemetery were we all are supposed to end up one day.
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