No Clock

I walked into a small room. I could feel the coldness of the industrial concrete floors even through my shoes. There was a cot against the wall, a bucket in the corner, and no windows but for an eye-level slit on the rusted metal door. The ceilings were about six and a half feet high. Taller than me, but low enough that I ducked my head instinctually.

I chuckled to myself and rolled my eyes. “You call this a concentration camp?”

The cell is located in an 18^th century fortress. The fortress in a small Czech town called Terezin. It is about one hundred kilometers from Prague, or a little over an hour by bus. The Nazis used the town as a hybrid ghetto and concentration camp in World War II. The fortress served as a prison. The German name is Theresienstadt.

From a historical perspective, Theresienstadt is fascinating. Unlike other ghettos it was never overcrowded. In fact, at a glance it was relatively pleasant. Inmates could wear civilian clothes. The children attended school. There were theater companies, orchestras, jazz collectives, soccer leagues, and even a magazine.

It opened before the final solution was enacted as a holding pen for privileged Jews from Czechoslovakia, Austria, and Germany. It housed the rich and famous, the intellectuals, the politicians, the artists. After the Wannsee Conference in 1942, things changed in Theresienstadt.

Like so many other camps in central Europe, it became a pit stop on the way to death by Zyklon B. In the end 88,000 people were deported to death camps (mostly Auschwitz) and 33,000 died in Theresienstadt itself. Enough to warrant building a crematorium.

But that’s not what separated Theresienstadt.

On June 23, of 1944 the Red Cross visited. What they found was a pleasant, functional Central European town complete with mayor and all. There were bars, and theaters, and children playing in parks. The Red Cross delegation was completely oblivious to the fact that just before they arrived, 7,500 Jews were deported to Auschwitz to eliminate the appearance of overcrowding. It was a propaganda coupe for the Nazis.

Theresienstadt was half concentration camp and half movie set. In fact, the Nazis even filmed a propaganda piece there, forcing Jewish inmates to act, produce, and direct it. The movie was called “The Fuhrer Gives A City to The Jews.” The day after filming wrapped, director Kurt Gerron, well known in Germany before the war, was sent to Auschwitz and killed immediately upon arrival. It was just one day before Heinrich Himmler ordered the gas chambers turned off.

In December, I visited those gas chambers in Auschwitz. What struck me more than anything was their size. Birkenau is massive. You can’t see across it. And every single inch resonates with despair. It is the world’s biggest grave. The emptiness leaves an impression. It leaves you with this vague sliver of an idea of the Holocaust. A sliver that only brings more questions and makes it harder to comprehend. You realize that you will never understand. The experience is completely emotional. There is no making sense of it. No logic. You don’t think about names or dates or facts. You just feel.

Theresienstadt was different for me. There was no emotion. It was more like walking through a Civil War battlefield or Alcatraz. I thought about the history.

“Wow, isn’t it interesting that this happened here?”

I read the brochures and went to the points of interest on my map. I smiled with the other tourists, interested, but not attached. For me, it was a stroll through a museum; stopping and starting at my own leisure.

I’m not sure why. It isn’t Birkenau or Majdanek, but Theresienstadt is in many ways equally tragic. More so than any other camp, it symbolizes the world’s ignorance and Nazi manipulation. Then there are the deaths.

But I wasn’t sad there. I was engrossed, I was cold, and I was a little hungry. But I wasn’t sad. It was not an emotional experience. Maybe it’s because I went in expecting that emotional impact and didn’t find it, but I really did think to myself, “You call this a concentration camp?”

That idea troubles me. The idea that after seeing maybe the darkest historical monuments the world has to offer, I will never appreciate other tragedies. If I go to Cambodia, and see the killing fields, will I think “sure it’s sad, but it’s no Auschwitz.”? I hope not.

Most young people laugh at the politicians and talking heads who bluster about desensitization. About how violent video games or films or music have shattered the collective conscience of American youth. But under all the insincere compassion and partisan bullshit, there is a trace of truth. They just have the source wrong.

It isn’t video games or music or “24” reruns that desensitize us, it’s reality. It’s the seeing explosions on CNN, reading death toll numbers from Iraq in the New York Times, getting handed the same pamphlets about Darfur every day. The acknowledgment of distant tragedy is as much a part of the college life as red plastic cups. Faraway misfortune is like ugly wallpaper in a rented house. We see it and don’t like it, but the large majority of us choose to ignore it. It isn’t fiction, but for most of us it isn’t reality either.

I know I am guilty of not feeling enough. I have no sense of the suffering caused by the AIDS epidemic. I rarely imagine myself walking in the shoes of the downtrodden. Why should I? My shoes are comfortable. I don’t feel their pain, I just know it exists.

But that should be enough. No matter how vivid my imagination is, I will never understand. Knowledge should inspire action the same way emotion does. It isn’t my or your responsibility to bare the crosses of millions. Only to alleviate the burdens of those whose crosses are heavier.

Tragedies are not like batting averages or stock prices. They are not to be measured by statistics. Taken alone, the number 6 Million doesn’t mean anything. In a human context it means something so profound as to be beyond definition. Tragedy, at least in my eyes, is entirely human. So I don’t believe it was the smaller death toll that prevented me from feeling anything at Theresienstadt. Maybe it was my own state of mind. Maybe it was how the place looked.

People live there now. It is their home. Kids ride bikes past the fortress, and play in the park across from the Holocaust museum. They learn, marry, and die in this place. It just looks like any drab Central European town. Sure it has the old fortress and fortifications, but it also has a river, a Spanish restaurant, and a bike path. The people of Terezin aren’t living in an old ghetto. They are living at home.