'Very Little a Truly Moral Voice Can Say'

No one knew where Dachau was or how to get there. My companion spoke good German. Mine was threadbare but enthusiastic. We would stop a likely looking person on the street in Munich and ask for directions. Suddenly they lost the power of speech in any language and moved along. The same with waiters in cafes. This was the summer of 1973, less than a year after eleven Israeli athletes had been slaughtered at the city’s Olympic Village by Palestinian terrorists. Finally, we asked the right person, an American, who told us where to meet the bus that would take us to the concentration camp, just eleven miles away. Early the next morning, we and a dozen other tourists met at the bus stop. 

Among our fellow passengers were two schoolteachers from Chicago, both gay. One carried a Frisbee and told the rest of us to expect no solemnity out of them. They were going to Dachau to have a little fun and not be coerced into hypocritical reverence. They told us they were Jewish. I, like the rest of the passengers, kept my mouth shut. I felt angry, powerless, embarrassed as an American, a reader of history, a human being.

 

At the camp, the pair from Chicago played Frisbee and laughed. We saw the foundations of the barracks where prisoners were kept and the crematorium. It was a beautiful summer day, blue skies and sunshine, and we walked around the place where at least 40,000 people, mostly Jews, were murdered. The normalcy of the day and our historical awareness could not be reconciled. The universe seemed out of whack, as in one of those inexplicable dreams in which you no longer recognize the face of someone you’ve known all your life. Mark Kurlansky published "Visiting Auschwitz" in Partisan Review (Vol. LXI, No. 2) in 1994. He writes:

 

“The place remains incomprehensible and its questions as unanswerable as those o fJob. . . . The problem is that there is very little a truly moral voice can say.”

 

And this:

 

“Auschwitz shows things that are beyond commentary – human hair, the eyeglass frames, the piles of toothbrushes, an unremarkable-looking oven, like a bread oven, gallows where prisoners were hanged and walls where they were shot and laboratories where they were worked on. Somehow families drift through this. Many of the visitors weep. Others look stunned. Some look like bored tourists shuffling from exhibit to exhibit, taking snapshots to mark each spot.”