When We Are Called to Sadness

It took eight hours to get from Kraków to Oswiecim, Polish for Auschwitz, though the distance can usually be completed in less than two. As I waited along the railway, the stench of abandonment floated out of buildings and vacant lots. The rough pebbles bouncing along my suede lace-ups were so dusty, it was as if they hadn’t been kicked in years.
Maroon boxcars slowly chugged along to their resting place: the dead end of the railroad that just so happened to be my starting point.
I sat on a comfortable train, roomy and warm, with my bag tucked beneath my seat and my eyes peeking at the grey world. I looked at all the youthful faces around me, mostly ashen and expressionless.
I had to admit, going to their country for the sole purpose of seeing Auschwitz was questionable, and the roundabout trek from Kraków to the site underscored this fact. Nobody would tell me where Auschwitz was. The woman at the airport gave me false directions; the bellhop of a random hotel pointed first left and then right; the Starbucks worker put me on the wrong bus entirely; it was as if the town itself wanted to forget that the camps were there.
There were two more stops, and thus I safely arrived in Oswiecim. As soon as I walked to the site’s entrance, something didn’t feel right.
Auschwitz is converted into a modern-day museum. There were headsets to use for guided tours, a souvenir shop with countless books, postcards, and posters, and a tiny food court of vending machines and tables.
I didn’t know whether to smile or nod to the workers. I didn’t even know whether it was offensive to ask where the bathrooms were. People were taking pictures of killing walls and barbed wire and sky-high steel guard towers. Groups of children were on tours with their schools. Leftover rain was cutting through creases in the barracks as if the walls were crying. The sun was setting. I saw someone leave the gas chamber sobbing. There were carvings of names on doors. I peeked into suffocation cells.
The entire time, through all the pictures in each building of mangled prisoners and displays of threadbare striped uniforms, I didn’t shed a tear. I saw things I never want to see again in my life, things that made me question humanity. And yet, not a single tear. I watched others' eyes welling with tears around every corner and was ashamed by my own stoicism.
The unexplainable attraction to sites and graves of mass death is labeled “thanatourism,” dark tourism.
So why do we do it? (Continued..)