July 22, 2010
A bird’s nest in the gas knobs at the Terezin Crematorium
NOTES FROM A YEAR LATER: 7.22.11 It’s been exactly a year since I went to Terezin/Theresienstadt Concentration Camp in Czech Republic. At the time, the experience was beyond words. I wondered if it would stay that way, and it has. In hindsight, it was a point after which I was different, and I could talk about that better than I could talk about the experience itself.
These snapshots are a few that I made of the swallows who nested in the valves and knobs of the crematorium and the latches of the torture chambers. The youngest person tortured here was four years old.
The triptych of photographic work I made with the old cameras – it shows next month at Yeshiva University Museum in New York. To me, that feels like the angry and grieved tribute I longed to make. But it’s not otherwise helpful, emotionally. These…the birds…the knobs…the avian feces covering a profane and sacred place…all this still comes closest to that.
I think daily of these birds and what I hope is their role on this sad planet. I hope they are angels, with their wings wiping away the tears of those who were murdered here. It’s a trite and sentimental thought. More uselessness. But there’s a fierceness behind it that must be covered up, because alongside my ferocity is its companion: the longing to swaddle, too, to wrap up in soft white cloths and soft songs and prayers and offer loving.
And the birds seem to offer both. Claws and beaks, as well as feathers and wings.
I remember, near the end of the visit to the camp, a group of young boys who left the education room ridiculing the Jews who were crying inside. Oh, the sad Jews, they said, rubbing their eyes and pretending to sob, mimics of the pain they’d witnessed. They stood a moment by the swimming pool, where many Jewish slaves died while making it, as the SS officers’ wives and children watched on from the windows above. In the museum, there was a photo of the SS officers throughout the history of the camp: all smiles, confidence, heads back in laughter and triumph: as if to say, finally, we are happy here. This testimony to sadism will never leave me. The boys laughed as they finished their mock-sobbing. They stood at the pool, a few hundred feet from the execution range, where the ground is still pocked and split by bullets, and the soil darkened by blood. The boys had purchased food at the Concentration Camp snack bar: cokes and popsicles. They threw the trash on the ground. We, the crying Jews, picked it up for them.
The birds. Everything is the swallows, their eggs, the babies born here, the lingering smell in the concrete rooms…terror, horror, cruelty.
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07.22.10: PRAGUE
May it be the Shechinah who dwells now at Terezin. I have nothing to say tonight.
bird perched on gas pipes in Crematorium at Terezin
Bird on pipes leading to main gas canister at Terezin.
Female bird in nest over door to gas room and male bird perched on gas pipes to Crematorium at Terezin.
birds perched and nesting in the gas Crematorium at Terezin
Bird nest with female bird built over the vent to the gas room at Terezin
bird nest adjacent to gas ovens in Crematorium at Terezin
birds nests in gas chambers at Terezin
bird perched on door to torture chamber #2 at Terezin
bird perched at door to torture chamber #10 at Terezin