Two Emotional Days In Poland

The town that Kalman Preiss called home for the first 27 years of his life is called Kutno.

It sits a little less than two hours northwest of Warsaw and about an hour north of Lodz. When Kalman lived there, Kutno was part of Russia.

Today it's a quaint, historic town in Poland. This past Saturday, TigerBlog became the first member of his family to return to the town that Kalman, his great-grandfather, and Beckie, his great-grandmother who was born in Warsaw, left in 1899. 

The town has a lovely walking street in the middle, with fountains in a park at one end and outdoor restaurants that were filled on this cool early summer afternoon. The people were incredibly friendly. Everyone TB stopped to talk to made him feel welcome. He didn't find anyone who spoke English, but he communicated through Google Translate, going from English to Polish and then having them speak to him by going from Polish to English. 

About an hour earlier, TB had been driving up from Lodz, where he had been staying. As he saw the first signs for Kutno, he smiled. He even got out of his rental car on the shoulder of the road after making a U-turn to take his picture with the sign at the outskirts of the town. 

What would his life have been like had Kalman never left, he thought? What if he too had been born here and lived here and was one of these people he was talking to, if he was the one who spoke no English, who never had been to America, who never had seen a Princeton Athletic event?

Then he thought back 24 hours earlier and remembered what would have actually happened had Kalman not left here. Kalman died in 1949 of natural causes. Had he stayed in Kutno, he would have been murdered, along with every other member of his family, a few years before that.

TB told you Friday that he was in Poland and said he would tell you today why. There were two reasons. The first was to see Kutno, to get a sense of where his roots were. 

The other was to see the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, to remind him that he would have had no roots had Kalman not left.

Why did he leave in 1899? Who knows. About one-third of Kutno was made up of Jews when he left. Maybe he feared what the Russians might do? Maybe he thought there'd be better opportunities for him, as a tailor, in America.

Whatever the reason, his instinct was live-saving. By 1939, the Jewish population of Kutno was 7,709, still around a third of the town. Once the Nazis conquered Poland to start the war, a Jewish ghetto was set up in Kutno, at the site of an old sugar factory. In early 1940, all of the Jews were forced into that small space, with little to no food. The camp was liquidated on March 19, 1942. Those who made it through there alive were sent to the Chelmno extermination camp.

TB found the remains of the ghetto Saturday, where some of the original buildings still stand. Those buildings were nowhere near enough to house nearly 8,000 people, and most of the ghetto was outdoors, where the Jews were forced to live with no shelter against the harsh summers and frozen winters. 

All 7,709 of those Jews — every single one of them — was murdered in the Holocaust. Not one Jew in Kutno, or for that matter, not one Jew among the 125,000 in the county, survived. Among those 7,709 from Kutno were three other branches of the Preiss family. 

Standing outside the fence looking in and reading the small plaque dedicated to those who died there was haunting. FatherBlog was born in 1935. Had the family stayed, he would have been one of the ones who died there, along with the rest of his family.

That was one of the more overwhelming moments of TB's trip. It was not the most overwhelming, though, even with how personal it could have been.

TigerBlog woke up early Friday and made the nearly three-hour drive south from Lodz to the outskirts of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. As his GPS guided him to the parking lot at Birkenau, the last mile or so took him through typical European suburbia. There were houses that were a little smaller than those in America, but they were definitely nice and well-maintained. Two blocks away was a house with a child's swingset in the front yard. One block away was a driveway with a basketball court. 

On the next street, everything took a turn for the ominous.

TigerBlog has, through the years, developed a few traits from the two jobs he's had, as a sportswriter and an athletic communications person. 

The first is the ability to maintain at least some neutral distance from an event. Whatever emotion he's feeling, no matter how much he's wanted Princeton to win, he could never cheer or change his facial expression, and he could count on one hand the number of times he's deviated from that in all these years.

The other is to take an emotionally detached view of the proceedings in front of him so that he could write about them as effectively as possible. He always looks for little things, subtle things, turning points in games, habits of coaches or athletes that they might not even recognize themselves. To that end, he's not always in the moment of what he's seeing. He's more processing it in his head to chronicle later.

Through the years, he's been to places like Gettysburg, Manassas, Dealey Plaza in Dallas — even Normandy. He's been awed by these places. He has been humbled to be someplace where such historical events, with so much death, occurred. 

He has never had the feeling he had Friday. It wasn't the same kind of overwhelming emotion. It was something much deeper. It was chilling. It was hard to even consider for a moment that what he was seeing, what he was experiencing, was based on real events.

TB's default to moments that are wildly emotional is to make a joke. He didn't dare do so at Auschwitz. He saw a young woman in his group who was wearing an "Arkansas Softball" jacket. Arkansas played Princeton last year and Harvard this year in the NCAA tournament. TB didn't dare look her up or talk to her about it.

TB was supposed to start at Auschwitz I, and not Birkenau, which sits three kilometers away. His ticket was for a tour with an English guide, starting at the time he walked up to the Birkenau gate, so he just jumped on with another group as soon as he heard the guide — a woman named Ivana — speak in English.

There were three main camps and 48 satellite camps in the area. The nearby houses that TB drove past on his way in are occupied by Poles whose families owned the land before the war, when the Nazis kicked them out. As Ivana said, they wanted no witnesses to what they were doing.

TB recognized the entrance to Birkenau. There were train tracks that ran into the camp, under a brick archway. On the other side of the archway was a stone platform. That's where the infamous Selection took place.

Jews from all over Europe had been loaded onto box cars, 70 or 80 to a car, with no food, no water and only a bucket for a toilet. Depending on the distance traveled, it could take a few days or as many as 10 or more to reach this end of the line. Not everyone survived the trip.

Those who did were divided into two groups on arrival. About 20 percent, those who were deemed by a Nazi doctor's glance to be able to do slave labor, were sent through gates into the concentration camp. The other 80 percent were sent directly across the tracks to the gas chambers. That was it. 

The gas chambers at Birkenau could be used to murder 1,500 people at a time. The victims were told they were going to have showers and be fed and processed. Within minutes, they were dead, their bodies moved to the crematoriums. Eventually, the killings overwhelmed the crematoriums, and bodies were moved to the fields nearby to be burned outside.

Ivana took the group of 15 through the ruins of the gas chambers and crematoriums, which had been blown up by the Nazis just before the Soviet Red Army arrived on January 27, 1945, and liberated the camp.

After that, the tour went through the Birkenau barracks, where between five to eight people slept in small spaces, with a top level, a middle level and then the lower level, which was the stone floor. They worked 10 hours a day, and their meals consisted of coffee or tea in the morning, soup made from rotted vegetables for lunch and a small piece of bread and one small piece of sausage for dinner. That was it.

When that group finished the tour of Birkenau, TB took a shuttle to Auschwitz I to do what was supposed to be the first part of the tour. He joined in with another group — his tour guide this time was named Christopher — that was just starting out. First up was an eight-minute movie, available in nearly 20 languages.

The movie alone was enough to gut-punch any visitor. The filmmakers had taken modern-day video of the places around the camps and then folded in pictures of the exact same spots from the war. You'd see the railroad tracks as TB had just seen them, and then you'd see them slowly fade back to 1942 or so, suddenly filled with hundreds of people on the platform, most unaware that they had only minutes to live.

At one point, the narrator said something TB had never considered: "Most of the people you see in these pictures," he said, "spent less time here than you will today."

After the movie, it was out into the courtyard, where TB first saw the infamous "Arbeit Macht Frei" sign. It means "work will make you free," but as Christopher said, the Nazis had no intention of setting anyone free.

Christopher took the group through Auschwitz, which began as a prison/concentration camp for Polish intellectuals, Soviet prisoners, Roma Gypsies, homosexuals and some Jews — as well as anyone else deemed as unfit to join the Master Race. They lived there under the same horrific conditions that the slave laborers who made it past Selection at Birkenau did.

Auschwitz I did have the gas chamber where Zyklon B, an insectisde, was used for the first time, against some Poles and Soviets, 500 people in all. It took hours for them all to be killed. The Nazis then sped up the process, not to be more humane but to be more efficient and be able to murder at higher and higher quantities.

Christopher also showed the group the area where scientific experiments were performed on prisoners and also the cells that were used for punishment.

There were only 200 people who ever escaped from the camps. That's 200 out of 1.3 million. When one did escape, the Nazis would murder 10 or more in retaliation.

Christopher told the story of Maximilian Kolbe, a Polish priest who volunteered to replace someone else and be murdered by starvation along with 11 others in a room so cramped that nobody could sit down. The man he replaced was named Franciszek Gajowniczek, a Polish soldier; he lived to be 93.

There were two places in the camp where picture taking is forbidden. The site where Kolbe and so many others died was one of them. The other was in an area where there were stockpiles of human hair that had been used to make cloth.

One area where you could take pictures was that first gas chamber. The only rule there is that silence must be maintained. 

TB took photos throughout. Anyone he spoke to at home asked him not to send them, because they'd be too disturbing. They're right. TB took pictures of the portraits on one of the walls, of men and women who were prisoners in Auschwitz, all of whom died. These were pictures taken by the Nazis when they arrived to keep a record, something that would eventually be replaced by branding numbers on forearms. When TB was little, he remembers seeing a few people who had those brands. 

In each of the portraits, the person staring back at TB looked ashen. He looked at nearly 1,000 of them. There was only one that had the slightest hint of a smile, one that TB would like to think was in defiance. 

He took pictures of the case which was stocked with shoes collected from those who had been murdered after Selection. There were thousands of them. Each one was heartbreaking; the worst heartbreaks came from the littlest ones.

When TB got back to his rental car when he was finished, he felt an overwhelming sense of guilt. How could he now go and get something to eat or drink after seeing that? How could he listen to music in the car? How could he laugh, or think about where he'd be going next? 

All of those people in the camp who died? They never had those chances.

Maybe the only solace TB could think of was the possibility that all of those resources that went into the Holocaust detracted from the Nazi war effort at the fronts. Perhaps that helped shorten the war. 

How could anyone go through all that and not be affected by it? You can't.

Between 1940 and 1945, at least 1,300,000 people, of whom 1,100,000 were Jewish, came to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Of that number, less than 200,000 were not murdered in the camp. Of that group, most were sent to other camps and likely were killed there. Just before the Soviets arrived, the Nazis marched 7,000 weak and starving prisoners 70 kilometers to get away, leaving behind only those who were already too sick to move. None of those 7,000 survived. 

There are fewer Jews alive today than there were in 1939. That's anywhere in the world, not just in Europe.

Before he left, TB found Ivana and asked her how often she gives tours. The answer was usually one per day, but sometimes twice. How could she stand to see that much misery every day, TB asked her.

Ivana is Polish. She has blue eyes. Christopher is also a Pole. He also has blue eyes. Are either of them Jewish? TB didn't ask. For that matter, there were three young men on the second tour TB took, on the Auschwitz side. Two were from Wales. One was from Ireland. They looked like any three Princeton athletes off of any Princeton team.

TB asked them why they had come to this place. They were on vacation — holiday, they call it — and were taking trains throughout Europe. They said that this was someplace they felt they had to go. Were they Jewish? TB didn't ask them either.

It doesn't really matter, does it? 

Ivana told TB she does this for a simple reason. She wants everyone who comes through the camps to learn as much as they can from her and then tell as many people as they can about what happened there. 

That's what TB wanted to do today, even if he didn't really talk about Princeton Athletics and even if he said way more than he usually does. Forgive him for that. This was a very personal two days.

It's impossible to sum up the emotions he's felt, especially those of Friday at Auschwitz-Birkenau. 

All he can do is repeat that he's never experienced anything else close to what he felt there. 

TB was asked by quite a few people, including those in his family, why he wanted to go there in the first place. His answer was always the same: "no idea." He still doesn't know why. Like the 20-somethings from Wales and Ireland, he just thought it was something he needed to do. 

You can read about it. You can watch documentaries and movies. 

It's not until you stand there, on that platform, or walk under the "Arbeit Macht Frei" sign, that you get a real sense of the place, the site of the largest mass murder ever committed, — a place that punches you right in the face, stuns you, drops you to ground and, TB assumes, leaves you a bit staggered forever.