The Lies Ill-Concealed

There was a woman, as I read, named Eleanore Baur who made it her mission each year at Christmas to visit the inmates at Dachau with cookies and cigarettes. She became known as Sister Pia. An especially devoted and early member of the National Socialist movement, Baur is the only woman involved in the Munich Beer Hall Putsch and was rewarded for her early loyalty to the Third Reich with a villa in Dachau and considerable influence in the camp, of which she was the appointed "welfare sister."

Here the story becomes more specific. Her visits were always marked by long, patriotic speeches in which she reprimanded prisoners for hurting the Fuehrer's heart by not being social, productive members of society. Furthermore, she exerted considerable influence in the camps. She could select "pets" and "favorites" who she would request work at her villa on projects that ranged from cleaning, cooking, renovations, to reported sexual abuse. While she never directly harmed anyone, her influence could be used to tremendous personal advantage or disadvantage. She survived the war, served a brief sentence, and then lived out her days in her villa, reinstated with her rank and pension.

I stumbled across this brief but disturbing biography while scouring Dachau's archives. A far cry from the rich, decorous splendor of Munich and it's garland-decked alleys and towering Christmas trees, the area around the Dachau concentration camp is flat, sterile, and cold. A mist hovered slightly in the air and the sun-less sky matched the greyness of the area.

I would also visit the Munich Stadtmuseum while in town and examine the exhibit specifically dedicated to the rise of the Nazis in Munich, examining propaganda, artifacts, and more information about the early momentum of National Socialism. Yet for the moment, the history of the location was almost tangible, an invisible exhibit that was none-the-less present and occupied a space more in the head than in the physical realm.

My goal was simple and complex at the same time. Dachau was designed for political and social prisoners such as communists, homosexuals, clergy, Soviet POWs,  politicians and resistance fighters. The turbulent history of Germany and Europe after 1945 left complicated legacies for these groups. Communists and homosexuals especially did not enjoy sudden popularity in West Germany (or East Germany for that matter) after the war. In fact, homosexuality's criminalization continued in Germany well into the 1970s, excluding homosexual prisoners from being involved with memorials dedicated to inmates' experiences at Dachau. My curiosity focused on how the persecution and brutality of these "political" groups was taught in Europe during a time where said groups still did not enjoy sympathy or popular opinion.

My initial examinations of books from the Dachau archives gave a chilling but comprehensive overview of Holocaust education shortly after the end of the war. Students described teachers staring at their shoes, sweating and panicked when talking about the NS period. There was tangible discomfort for both educators and the students who secretly wanted to know what their teachers had done during the war. However, political groups were somewhat excluded in from this dialogue. Homosexuals were not included in the 1968 camp memorial as homosexuality was still criminalized during that time. Some students protested the exclusion of former prisoners from now-communist nations from participation in the commemoration, an action which some western media outlets interpreted as Neo-Nazism.

In fact, many Soviets (who had been under strict instruction not to surrender) returned back to the USSR after the war to face accusations of collaboration and face even more prison time. Yet such information is uncommon in American Holocaust education. While the Jewish population of Europe suffered catastrophic losses, many other groups are ignored when discussing Nazi brutality.

I left the archives with answered questions, unanswered questions, and plethora of new, more complicated questions that buzzed around my head like frozen rain. I walked into the mist of late-afternoon, thinking of Sister Pia, and lines of prisoners, each with a narrative that may perhaps be lost in the recesses of time.

Smoke! Smoke!

Mid-December at the Salzburg Christmas Market.

I am greeted instantly by the sharp, illicit smoke of frankincense, resting, smoldering like stolen jewels in bronze platters. It is a stubborn scent, the scent of festivity and atonement (or was myrrh meant to symbolize sorrow?) that hovers almost toxic in the crisp cool of mountain air. It contrasts with what the sweet musk of dry hay in the plastic manger, the caramelized decay of roasted nuts, the lingering sour of hot wine. I think of easter, of those Episcopal services where I would hold my nose not to breathe in the incense swung throughout the sanctuary like a wrecking ball.  “Some things,” I would tell my self, “are best left uncleaned.” 

Here too, I gaze around the mustard-yellow walls of old money fallen from power, a house left like a gutted palace to remind all of lost opulence, discarded with the same casual approach as an other loss that went unnoticed until it was too late. The shutters are open, lined on the inside with the sheen of synthetic metal paper, dominated by black numbers, marking the day of the month. The sky fades from an almost chemical blue to the dark of early evening and, for a moment, there is the syzygy of primary color, the fire-hot red ornaments tossed on trees and illuminated by melting candles, the lemon-ripe house, and the cold blue of a dying day’s sky. “This is such a thing,” I realize,”that needs no purification. The fumes are a waste of fire.”

I am told, however, that it is truly only the blend of myrrh and frankincense that can cleanse. One on its own yields no reaction. Yet this fact seems lost. The flow of bank notes continues without interruption as the shoppers tuck away their goods and inhale strong, deep breaths of burning frankincense, hoping it will keep them absolved for another year. 

Don't Tell Mama

Simply put, I fell in love with Prague. It's nobody's fault. I was born this way. We are in love and are getting married.

An exaggeration? Perhaps. But not by much. I spent a weekend in Prague on a whim and picked exactly the right time to be there. Between Christmas decorations, the wonderfully seductive smell of hot wine and cooking smoke, and the overall surrealist vibe, there was little not to love. I spent the better part of the weekend walking through the mazes of the old town. It was almost reminiscent of the fabled labyrinth. Despite my best attempts, I never seemed to follow the same route twice to get places. The streets twist and turn in a maze of Goliathan buildings that ooze age and good taste. Yet, it seemed delightful surprises rather than a malevolent bull-man figure was lurking behind every corner. I'm perhaps too comfortable with just showing pictures. However, I have no choice here. Describing the wonderful and invigorating time I had would be insufficient. I spent a few hours watching Jan Svankmajer films on loop in the modern art museum then went to see the Christmas market officially open. I wandered through the Old Jewish Cemetery and examined buildings of historical significance in both Prague Spring and the Velvet Revolution all in the same weekend. It happened in such a blur that I'm quite happy that I took so many pictures.

Frankly, I distrust memory.

Mein damen und herren, madames et messieurs, ladies and gentlemen...I am pleased to present you with...Prague, a city in pictures (and comments from me).

So this building stood out to me as something to photograph. It reminded me of what a building might look like if Edward Gorey converted to Christianity and started sketching on buildings. 

This is the building where the Golem is supposedly hidden. There's no way to get into the attic (where the Golem allegedly is) but previous expeditions into the attic (including a Nazi who supposedly climbed in and never came out) have not yielded any proof that there's really a Golem hidden there. It's a pity. Who couldn't use a big, strong Jewish man lying around the house?

Kafka statue. You'll notice it's sitting on top of a mosaic of the infamous "monstrous vermin."

Death and a Turk on the Astronomical clock. Apparently white Christians could not be associated with sin in the Middle Ages. Go figure. 

Giant faceless babies at the modern art museum. 

Old Jewish Cemetery. The graves are 12 layers deep and over 150,000 bodies are buried here.

The World Won't End

This month has been something of a whirlwind. I could go into a long, overly detailed explanation...so I will. I spent the first part of the month traveling to Warsaw, Berlin and Norway (you can read more about this in my previous post. Two days after I returned from Berlin (on a Wednesday), I was in Krakow with a few other of my darling Fulbright family visiting Auschwitz. The general consensus seemed to be that we all knew it was a place that needed to be visited and none of us wanted to visit it alone. So we bundled in our coats against a wet November chill and rode in the comfort of a minibus to the site synonymous with unimaginable atrocity. To be quite candid, I'm not sure how I felt. I expected to feel more than I did. There was something simultaneous sickening and numbing about the entire experience. The two emotions were unsettlingly able to exist inside me for a few hours without dulling the other. There were some rooms which evoked remarkable disgust (such as a room full of human hair, a separate one filled with artificial limbs stolen from murdered inmates, and countless others). The impact was jarring. It was like looking at the lives of people you don't know in individual pieces, as if the material objects that represent their existence were organized and compartmentalized behind glass. The absurdity of the Holocaust, the lack of logic behind it, was evident. This is where the numbing came in. It was like looking at a surgery on screen. There was something quite real about it but also a comfortable barrier of historical distance that allows it to exist simultaneously as something existing in the same state of reality in which history dwells. This post will be shorter. It's almost like the monument to Loss mentioned in Memoirs of a Geisha. An artist builds a monument to loss with one word on it. However, the word is scratched off because when one experiences loss, it cannot be read, only felt. There's not much I can do to explain the complexities that I'm still feeling from this particular visit. Words are painfully inadequate.