In 2022, an errant software program embarrassed the German marketing department of Kentucky Fried Chicken by emailing the following: "It's Memorial Day for Kristallnacht! Treat yourself with more tender cheese on your crispy chicken. Now at KFCheese!"
Apparently, the software didn't know that chicken and cheese together aren't kosher. KFC quickly apologized, disavowed the e-mail, and blamed it on an "error in the system." The only thing more tasteless might have been the 11 herbs and spices that are supposedly part of the original KFC recipe.
Six weeks ago, my wife and I were on a tour bus in Poland when a red and white striped KFC suddenly appeared at the front of a shopping center in the town of Oswiecim. After not having visited Europe since 2010, we'd been surprised by the number of McDonald's and Starbucks in Italy (no Olive Garden or Pizza Hut, not yet anyway). It wasn't just their presence; most of the customers weren't homesick American tourists, they were locals.There aren't as many franchises in Poland, but the monoculture of American fast food capitalism has clearly gotten its plastic-straw hold in post-Solidarity Poland.
The bus driver didn't stop, so I didn't get to see if KFC extended its Kristallnacht special on cheesy chicken. We were, after all, just a couple kilometers from the epicenter of the Holocaust, the death camp where a million people were systematically murdered by the Nazis.The German name for Oswiecim is, of course, Auschwitz. How could something so pedestrian be so close to the bleakest place in the world?
Understandably, the Poles take care to keep the name of the town separate from the German name for the death camp the Nazis named for the town. As you approach, store signs translated into English and other languages for the benefit of the 1.67 million visitors in 2023 to Auschwitz-Birkenau advertise "cold drinks and Polish souvenirs." I suspect many tourists do buy postcards, books, and memorial objects to "never forget" the site now maintained by the Polish government. It's just that an advertisement saying "Auschwitz Souvenirs for sale" feels either too ghoulish or too much like celebrating Kristallnacht with a cheesy chicken sandwich at KFC.
A few kilometers pre-KFC, we noticed every gravestone in the roadside cemeteries had been festooned with brightly colored bouquets. Was this some sort of tribute to those who died in the camp? I later determined it wasn't. For one, traditional Jews don't put flowers on gravesites. They prefer the more solemn and less ephemeral practice of placing a stone on the grave marker. At the end of Schindler's List, the survivors do exactly that. While Auschwitz is less than an hour from Schindler's Krakow factory (he later moved his factory to what is now the Czech Republic), Schindler's workers didn't come from Auschwitz, though there is one scene where some of his female workers are mistakenly sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau. The Jews who worked for Schindler came from Plaszkow, a labor camp closer to Krakow. I suspect I was one of many viewers who missed this distinction.
We're supposed to never forget the Holocaust, but trying to keep the details straight can both confuse and overwhelm. Before the trip, I thought my most direct connection to the camp was an old friend whose father, 14 at the time, had escaped the camp at the end of the war and hailed down a vehicle filled with what turned out to be American soldiers. His Dad had shared his story with me at their dinner table more than 40 years ago. Only, the Americans didn't liberate Auschwitz; the Russians did.
After my visit, I would email my friend and mention I missed some details of his father's story. It turned out his father had been at Plaszkow where the commandant (Ralph Fiennes in the movie) really did take random shots at prisoners in the middle of the night. He, however, had never spent time in Auschwitz, where he most likely would have died. Instead, he was ultimately transferred to Buchenwald, a labor camp in Germany when the European half of the war ended. They were being marched out of the camp when a friend and he decided to walk away from the rest of the group and hide in the woods. They hailed a vehicle filled with what turned out to be American soldiers instead of the Russian ones who were also nearby. The Gestapo—the war already clearly lost—shot thousands of prisoners who stayed on that march out of Buchenwald.
I also thought Rick's father was a Polish Jew, which he was, but his village is now in the Ukraine, though it may not be part of the Ukraine for much longer depending on the outcome of our Presidential election. Even if he never set foot in Auschwitz, my friend Rick's late father remains my closest personal connection to the Holocaust.
It turned out the flowers in the roadside cemeteries might have been for Corpus Christi, a Catholic religious celebration that falls on June 8th. The first transport of prisoners to Auschwitz, Polish dissidents, was on June 14, 1940.
Just after we passed the first cemetery beyond the KFC, our bus went silent. My wife and I were the oldest people on the trip by at least 20 years. Most of our tour group consisted of college volleyball players coached by our daughter and son-in-law. We'd come along partly to babysit our five-year-old grandson. Up to that point, we'd been on the fringes of some very loud meals, unison singing with the Polish junior national team, and social bonding in airports and buses. The night before, our daughter had sent a group email to her players with an attached article detailing the significance of Auschwitz. She wanted to make sure all of them knew what they were about to see/experience. Apparently many weren't aware, something that surprised me. The group included a Polish player whose family lived 15 minutes from the Ukrainian border, an Italian player whose parents emigrated from South Sudan, and a player whose parents were from Israel. If World War I didn't really turn out to be the "War to End All Wars," Auschwitz tragically has also not been the atrocity to end all atrocities.
They have mostly likely never heard of movies like Schindler's List (1993) and Sophie's Choice (1982). In summer 2023, I suspect more of them saw Barbie than Zone of Interest. I suspect our younger tour members were still processing the article and the coming visit to what was essentially an inverted theme park, the place where killing was made so efficient that of the six million European Jews who died in the Holocaust, one in six died at Auschwitz-Birkenau. In addition, 70,000 non-Jewish Poles, 21,000 Roma (some believe at least as large a percentage of the Roma population died in the Holocaust as did that of the Jewish population), 15,000 Soviet POWs, and 25,000 others were murdered there. Words wither into silence in the face of such details.
I'd imagined the immediate area around Auschwitz-Birkenau to be eternally cursed, a place so evil, nothing around it grows and all but those who have jobs at the site/museum have stayed as far away as possible lest the ghosts there haunt them relentlessly. That's not the case at all: trees, shrubbery, and brightly colored flowers abound; a set of well-kept modern apartments sits within a kilometer of the main parking lot; at one time, a shopping center was even planned across from the death camp site.
Two nearby shaded playgrounds came in handy. There were three small children with us, and the museum recommends children under 14 not go inside. After we explained to our grandson he couldn't come, my wife accompanied him to the playground. We managed to avoid the "why": thousands of the victims were his age or younger.
As our bus slowed, groups of bicycle tourists passed us. If you didn't know, you could easily look around and tell yourself, "I could maybe live here." Many do. Nature has its ways of covering over the past.
The Auschwitz parking lot was filled with buses and cars. A low slung concrete and glass structure just before the entrance housed public restrooms and vending machines. Possibly unintentionally ominous—a sign offered visitors a place to store their luggage before going inside. The camp itself is fronted by a concrete bunker with a very defined entrance where bags are checked and visitors must pass through a metal detector. The security people are conspicuously armed. I found that ironic, so I took a picture with my cellphone. Yes, I'm that stupid.The female security guard noticed immediately and made me delete it.
In 2014, Swedish neo-Nazis masterminded the theft of the arched sign "Work will set you free" that greeted prisoners entering the camp. The sign was recovered, though it had been cut into three pieces and a replica now stands in its place. I suspect the very tight security minimizes the chance some group will try to stage a spectacle. Clearly Auschwitz's continued existence makes it a target for Holocaust deniers or others wanting to make an antisemitic statement. In addition, claims of Polish collusion with the Holocaust are so sensitive, a 2021 law attempted to make any mention of possible collusion a crime. Simply put, 79 years after its liberation from the Nazis, Auschwitz remains a politically volatile symbol. In the meantime, the guards and the concrete tunnel compound the sense of foreboding.
The guide for our English speaking tour (there are 20 different language tours), a dark-haired Polish woman possibly in her 60s, wore a somber-colored, ankle length dress that could easily have been in fashion during World War II. It wasn't out of style, more like there was a lost-in-time quality to her look and demeanor that made one wonder momentarily if she could have been an extra in one of the many Auschwitz movies.
Auschwitz-Birkenau's 324 tour guides are required to do seven weeks of training and pass three exams for a job both physically (at least three miles of continuous walking and talking in the midst of the Polish summer) and mentally demanding. She gives five to ten tours a week in her excellent-though-accented English. It must be exhausting, repeatedly showing people a gas chamber where hundreds of people were murdered each day; a children's barracks in Birkenau where 700 people occupied a space meant for 50; or cooking utensils, prosthetics, and baby clothes seized from the prisoners. How does one not periodically go full Edvard Munch?
While possible, it's unlikely our guide was Jewish. Just before the war, roughly three million Jews lived in Poland. Many had lived peacefully in Oswiecim for generations. One source estimates the current Polish Jewish population at less than 5,000. For roughly 150 years until just after World War I, Poland was deprived of its separate national identity by a mix of Austro-Hungarian, German, and Russian imperial ambitions.The Polish language was suppressed, forcible religious conversions (Orthodox and Protestant) took place, and Polish history was removed from schools. It was no accident that Casimir Pulaski (as in Pulaski, Virginia, and Pulaski, Tennessee, and Pulaski, Wisconsin) and Thaddeus Kosciuscko volunteered in the American Revolutionary War, that Chopin and Marie Curie spent most of their adult lives in France, or that Conrad wrote in English. In many ways, the Poles were the Palestinians of 19th century Europe. Throughout that period, Polish Jewry maintained a somewhat safer separate culture within their politically uncertain region.
The 44 years of Soviet domination following the defeat of the Nazis prompted many of the surviving Polish Jews to emigrate to Israel, the United States, or other more welcoming countries. The massacre of 42 Jews in Kielce in 1946—which like the Ping Pong Pizza incident, started with false allegations of child abuse—also contributed to Jewish flight and reluctance to resettle in post-war Poland.
The former Archbishop of Krakow Karol Wojtyia's ascension to the papacy as John Paul II, the first Polish Pope, preceded the Solidarity movement. John Paul II's support for Solidarity—so crucial that the KGB trained an assassin who managed to stab but not kill him—had a possible unintended effect: it further invigorated a sense of Polish identity or nationhood tied to being Catholic and Slavic.
John Paul II himself supported an ecumenical approach to other religions: having some sort of faith being preferable to none at all. As Archbishop of Krakow in 1965, he repudiated the belief that the Jews had engaged in deicide and asserted the validity of the Jewish faith. In 1979 he knelt before a Memorial to the victims of the Holocaust at Auschwitz. The Polish Pope later intervened with misguided church attempts to memorialize Auschwitz-Birkenau. A Carmelite convent had been established next to the grounds in 1984. The Pope recognized that the convent was both well-meaning and insensitive, and ultimately, out of respect for the approximately one million people murdered there simply for being Jewish, ordered the closing of the convent in 1993. In 1998, Polish Catholic Nationalists erected hundreds of crosses just outside the death camp. After considerable controversy, all but two were ultimately removed.
Our official guide (to protect the consistency of the information, the museum doesn't allow private or outside guides) spoke to us through a one way FM transmitter. A desk at the entrance issues individual receivers and headphones to the tour members. The surviving buildings in Auschwitz 1 are mostly brick, and much of the tour is through hallways and stairwells, not a conducive environment for FM transmission. As a result, our guide's explanations broke up at irregular intervals, something that added a sense of being trapped in the past.The FM transmitters keep the guides from having to shout, but they also minimize chances for group members to interrupt with off menu or off topic questions and comments. Our guide was clearly meant to be the speaker, and we were expected to be passive listeners.
As we walked the grounds, I fell into an odd mental game: asking myself what aspect or artifact of Auschwitz was the most disturbing. There are too many candidates: the "black wall" where resisting prisoners were routinely shot while their fellow prisoners were forced to witness; Zyklon B canisters; a hallway lined with prisoners' names and arrival and death dates, always far too close together (life expectancy for the prisoners who weren't immediately gassed was less than six months); lightless metal and stone isolation cells where difficult prisoners were kept; descriptions of rations calculated to keep prisoners just alive enough to keep working in IG Farben factories or on nearby farms; the ground where bodies were piled up and lit on fire when the pace of the murders exceeded the capacity of the camp's furnaces; the collections of shoes, suitcases, and hair that now sit behind glass.
Female prisoners had their heads shaved both for hygienic reasons and to make it easier to identify escapees. At the same time, the German fetish for efficiency resulted in prisoners' shaved hair getting disinfected, dried, packed in sacks, and sold for the production of hair cloth (much of it used in German army uniforms) and felt. Human hair was also used to make gun sights during World War II. The Auschwitz hair became evidence that Zyklon B was employed for executions and not just delousing (the chemical's intended use). At Treblinka, prisoners' heads were shaved before entering the gas chambers while at Auschwitz hair was taken from corpses (most women prisoners were executed shortly after getting off the train). According to our guide, chemical analysis found the Auschwitz samples to contain significantly heavier concentrations of Zyklon B. The two-ton mound of hair now on display is all that remains of 40,000 individuals. You want to touch it and you want to look away or even jump away all at once. In a place where barbarism was transformed into routines, cataloged, and called "research," the mass of hair reminds visitors that the Nazis took scalps on an industrial scale.
The exhibit includes a number of photos of the functioning camp. Many were taken and saved by the Nazis. Some were taken by prisoners and slipped out of the camp. Perhaps the most remarkable are photos somehow taken by Jewish prisoners forced to prepare their fellow prisoners for the gas chambers.
The Auschwitz-Birkenau museum observes a delicate balance. With most UNESCO World Heritage sites, preservation and even reconstruction happen routinely. Restoring Auschwitz-Birkenau raises innumerable ethical questions; it's important it look dilapidated and permanently inoperable, yet with sufficient evidence to show just how horrible and real it was. In Rome the day before, we wandered through the Colosseum where the underground portion was being renovated and large sections are constantly being restored. While not on the scale of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the horror of forcing prisoners to fight to the death before thousands of cheering spectators actually seems no less an affront to civilization. Perhaps the difference is that the Colosseum is seen as an architectural-engineering achievement for its time, while Auschwitz-Birkenau is preserved solely for its horrific nature. Perhaps also, it's just the way we look at time. We like to think our values have evolved since Roman times, while the Nazis are still too easy to revive for comfort.
In the meantime, what to restore or preserve and what to leave as rubble remains a delicate issue for the museum directors. The oldest of the trees that stood at the camp have passed their 80-year life expectancy. Do you replant? How well do you tend the grass? Which barracks at Auschwitz 1 become part of the tours? You certainly wouldn't make the gas chambers functional again just to show visitors how real they were.
It's not strictly a Polish matter. During the late 1950's (the Soviets returned control of the Auschwitz site to the Poles in 1947), individual countries were given control of the exhibits for the areas housing prisoners from that country. Somewhat controversially, Austria, Hitler's native country, was one of those countries, while Israel wasn't included until the late 1960's. To be fair, Israel, the country, didn't formally exist in 1942 and wasn't a source of Auschwitz prisoners. The Israeli portion is now known as Shoah 27 and controlled by the Yad Vashem Institute, a Holocaust Remembrance group in Jerusalem but not directly part of the Israeli government.
Birkenau is the German name for the nearby village of Brezinka, the location of an associated but physically separate death camp where some 90% of the executions were carried out. Before the Russians arrived, the Germans desperately tried to dynamite the evidence Birkenau was anything more than just another prison camp. It now mostly consists of dilapidated walls and disconnected chimneys. I would say Auschwitz-Birkenau strikes the balance between preservation and ruin. Auschwitz I looks almost usable in many areas, but at Auschwitz II the execution chambers remain leveled. A children's barracks has been restored. Other than that, only the infamous railroad tracks, where "doctors" examined the incoming prisoners and decided who would die immediately and who would become slave laborers and die more slowly, appear intact. Auschwitz II feels apocalyptic. Even the woods just beyond the camp seem placed there just to remind you you're standing in the middle of hell.
Curiously for me, Auschwitz I felt more disturbing precisely because of how much more ordinary it looks. The two-story brick buildings were originally Polish army barracks. They sit in neat rows lined by smooth roads with occasional bushes and trees softening the landscape. There's a bakery, a kitchen, a hospital, and—somewhat famously—a spot where a prisoner orchestra was forced to play music as other prisoners were marched to their deaths. While literally more regimented in layout, much of Auschwitz 1 looks more like a town or a campus than a prison. Any place could suddenly turn this evil.
The younger members of our group remained respectful and silent. I wondered what they were thinking as I watched them watching, but they didn't give any clues. Before going inside, I worried I might have to throw up (I was even careful to eat a smaller breakfast that morning) or walk away from some of the sights. I didn't, partly because the disturbances came in so steady a stream, hence no uncanny valley of horror. Similarly, the young women in our group stayed stoic throughout. There was so much I wanted to ask, but "Your family's from Israel and there's been October 7th and the retaliatory deaths of thousands of non-Hamas Palestinians... how's all this Holocaust business affecting you today?" didn't feel appropriate even for someone like me who's been known to raise awkward topics. Even though we were there as a group, there was an unspoken sense that individual reactions to what we were seeing was both private and sacred.
Towards the end of Auschwitz 1, our guide took a moment to point out the house (still at least 100 meters away) once occupied by Rudolf Hoss, the camp commandant, and his family. Although the directors actually used a different structure, the Hoss family home was prominently featured in Zone of Interest. In fact, the movie doesn't show the inside of the camp, despite the fact that the museum granted the director permission to film there. Our guide took another moment to distinguish between Rudolf Hoss and Rudolph Hess, then quickly moved on. I was relieved. Auschwitz is not a tourist attraction in the conventional sense. Otherwise, a closer look at the "house from the movie" would surely have been added to the tour.
As our bus exited Auschwitz I on its way to Auschwitz II, I was surprised to see a development of several single family homes sharing a fence with the former death camp. The homes looked fairly new, with backyards, satellite dishes, and even—dare I say—outdoor gas grills facing the camp. We stopped for lunch at a Polish restaurant for a typical Polish Sunday meal: chicken soup, a breaded chicken cutlet, and potatoes. Mid-lunch, a group of roughly 50 Scandinavian high school students appeared fresh from their own tour of Auschwitz. Student groups from a number of European countries including Germany and Poland routinely make the field trip. It's considered part of making sure they understand where excessive nationalism and scapegoating of other groups can lead.
Some Thoughts
I'm not sure that any of the college-aged members of our tour group really didn't know about Auschwitz. I suspect young people often are reluctant to embarrass one another about what the others might not know. If they didn't, they certainly know now, and I'm glad my daughter decided to include the stop on what was meant to be a "fun" trip. On our tour, our guide made repeated references to the things the Germans or the Nazis did. It's certainly accurate, but also a little dangerous in the way it encapsulates all of its sins to the Nazis and Hitler. It's pretty clear the allies, including the Americans, knew what was happening there and chose not to act immediately. Apparently, they rejected bombing the camp at one point because it might harm the prisoners. Looking back, does that make sense when 90% of the prisoners were dying there anyway? They could have bombed the rail lines leading to Birkenau as well. Similarly, many countries took a "no room at the inn" approach to taking in Jewish refugees.
While there's been much discussion about whether Israel should be punishing ordinary Palestinians for the disgusting crimes committed by Hamas on October 7th, with some even trying to compare Israel's response to the Holocaust, my own thoughts keep coming back to the United States. I don't think the Germans of the 1930's were inherently evil or good. Hitler combined radio, movies, and mass rallies to throw a kind of switch, one I suspect exists within all of us. If anything, social media has made that switch even more accessible and more dangerous. Many of us know how the switch works and just how dangerous it is. Some pull it anyway to serve their own ends. I just wish the switch to make it all stop didn't have to be so elusive.
I am worried about the way migrants are being vilified by certain groups. My own ancestors were illegal immigrants to America at a time when the Chinese were the only group that could be called "illegal immigrants." And yes, one of my grandparents was even a kind of gangster, though most of what he was doing is now legal. When I looked into the KFC Kristallnacht snafu, I happened to acquaint myself with the history of Kristallnacht itself. While we know it as a horrifying outburst of violent anti-semitism across Germany, Kristallnacht was also the product of anti-immigrant scapegoating.
The Nazis had turned up the volume against the 15,000 Polish Jewish immigrants who had settled in Germany, many of whom had lived their entire lives there. A law ordered all of them deported. The Polish government responded by passing a law that stripped anyone of Polish citizenship who had lived in another country for five years or longer without returning to Poland in the interim. The immigrants became stateless refugees who wound up in makeshift camps on the border. A 17-year-old Polish Jew who'd grown up in Germany but who saw no future there had slipped off to Paris, where he was also an illegal immigrant. Fwiw, he'd applied to emigrate to Palestine, but the British had denied him. Upset at letters from his sister about conditions in her refugee camp, he acquired a gun and shot and killed a Nazi official in the German embassy in Paris. The Nazis took the incident and amplified it into a false claim that the assassination of the official had been the product of an international Jewish conspiracy. The immediate result was Kristallnacht, a January 6th-like, managed riot against all German Jews.
On Kristallnacht, at least a hundred German Jews were killed and many more injured; synagogues, Jewish businesses, and homes were either destroyed or vandalized; thousands of German Jewish men were rounded up and placed in detention camps. The Nazis even demanded indemnities from the victims for damages done to their own properties. One can draw a very straight line from Kristallnacht in 1938 to Auschwitz-Birkenau. I see, too, a straight a line between broad-brushing migrants as rapists, murderers, drug dealers, and gang members, and where that sort of rhetoric of invasion can lead.
Thanks to groups like the Shoah Foundation, America now does a rather admirable job of memorializing the Holocaust with the Holocaust Memorial Museum, which opened in 1993 and primarily though not exclusively devotes its efforts to the World War II genocide. This is unquestionably a good thing, and if anything we need to do an even better job reminding ourselves about what really happened 80-plus years ago. That said, I compare that to the reception of the 1619 project and its attempt to focus attention on the impact of slavery on our own history. A century and a half after the Civil War, we're debating whether or not its a good idea to preserve statues and memorials glorifying Confederate leaders in prominent places. Part of me gets that there was until recently a Fort Bragg, North Carolina, but how in the world is there still a Fort Bragg, California?
Again, there are multiple Civil Rights museums, but we've been—to put it mildly—hesitant to memorialize the atrocity of slavery itself. For years, plantation tours were devoted to the grandeur of the slave-owners' homes while ignoring the conditions of those who actually built them. Until fairly recently, that included Mt. Vernon and Monticello. Some see teaching these things as somehow unpatriotic, and demand their removal from public school lessons because teaching about them may make white students uncomfortable or feel "guilt" about evil ancestors. Fwiw, most ancient cultures—white, black, yellow, and red—kept slaves at some point. My fellow Salon writer, Thomas J. Hubschman, argues in this issue that even "politically correct" labeling of groups has the effect of keeping them separate and seen as inferior. I would argue that when countries insist on solely glorifying their past and forgetting or at least obscuring injustices done to their own oppressed groups, the injustices of the past live on and often fester out of sight. It doesn't necessarily lead to Auschwitz-Birkenau, but there are lots of horrific things that fall short of that, Kristallnacht being one of them and no less atrocious.
In the meantime, there are efforts to help us remember the cruelty of slavery and other American atrocities. One fascinating example is the Old Slave Mart in Charleston. Founded in 1938 by a white woman from Ohio, Miriam Wilson, the "museum" originally celebrated slavery as a "good thing" and even sold a cookbook of old-time plantation recipes. After the original "museum" went under in 1987, it re-opened in the late 90's as a museum documenting the cruelty and hardships of the Middle Passage and the horrors of the slave auctions that once took place there.
Similarly, the privately funded Whitney Plantation outside New Orleans stands apart from more traditional plantation tours because it was restored expressly memorialize the tribulations of legal enslavement for more than two and half centuries (Auschwitz only operated between 1942 and 1945).
Whether it's Tulsa, Laramie, Wilmington, La Matanza (1915), Rock Springs,Tule Lake, or Wounded Knee, we as Americans need to understand why it's so important that groups of students, not just from Germany or Poland, visit Auschwitz every year. Preserving our memories of the glorious aspects of our past (harbingers of what we might aspire to be) is important, but history shouldn't be like fast food—too sweet, too easy to consume, and too filling, without supplying what students require for healthy growth: the whole grained fiber of our true past. Without the less glorious parts of our history, we run the risk of letting a once proud and working democracy devolve into a cautionary relic of what might have been.
