Swallows darted crooked circles with fluttering wings upon the blue sky overhead. Sunlight fell louche and effortless gifting deep shadows to all it touched. All the while a cool breeze kept my skin from sweltering, and in the midst of a calm July day I took a moment to enjoy this stillness.
A Polish summer is stiflingly continental and my legs, sheet white and freckled, showed from beneath my canvas shorts, fished from the innards of my rucksack.
The previous night’s antics spent on cheap beer and the red cobbles of Kraków’s medieval square had earned me a fragile disposition, eyes half closed, head blaring static, I tried collect myself in the peace of a midday sun.
To my left sprouted an ancient oak tree. Tall, gnarled and so consumed by lichen it appeared to glow, it’s hues green and soft. My friends had dispersed and were following their own spiderweb trails around the Auschwitz camp, guidebooks clenched firmly.
I felt no need to move, though my mind grew restless, the tree’s presence had sent my train of thought spiralling, how many years have you stood? How many summers have you lived? How many lives have you seen? How many footsteps did you count? How could you bear to watch it all? How towering, how stoic, how passive were you just decades ago when death lived in this very place where the swallows now glide?
You’re never told about the scratches, the grooves, faint yet etched, each tracing their own doom crashing silently into the next, over and over to form a tangle unbearable to behold and impossible to undo.
Here a people, a race and a generation met an end not chosen by the hand of fate, here they choked, gasped and clawed at the concrete of walls built to contain their demise. Leaving their marks scratched as proof of the evil which took them.
Outside the walls of the gas chambers was a brilliant summer’s day, outside birds sang, sunlight shone and a oak tree grew. It would be so easy to forget, to ignore.
Yet there I was, at 18 having made the choice to steer my travels towards the camp of Auschwitz, to attend and to observe this patch of land where our world succumbed to true hate. And in the somber shade of this swaying tree watching tour groups amble past, I understood what no guide could tell me, that life can indeed carry on. Where Auschwitz once stood a tree’s roots remain, burrowed firmly into the ground, they are the constant, the ever present and the hope which prevails,.
It’s strange isn’t it, of all the things I saw throughout my travels that which touched me deepest was a grand old trunk shrouded in countless leaves. Still standing where I last saw it, half a continent away, all that remains of a world gone to madness.
I don’t think I can ever explain how comforting this truly is.
