“We descend into the same river twice and yet we do not.” Invited by both the President of the General Council of Alpes-Maritimes and the CRIF (Representative Council of Jewish Institutions) to undertake a “journey of memory” to Auschwitz on Wednesday, April 11, some 160 middle school students from various institutions in Nice and its region [[1)-Jules Romains Middle School in Nice, Les Bréguières Middle School in Cagnes-sur-Mer, Nazareth Middle School in Nice, Saint-Philippe Néri Middle School in Juan-Les-Pins, Saint-Exupéry Middle School in Saint-Laurent-du-Var]] will undoubtedly reflect on this aphorism by the philosopher Heraclitus. Some of them, like Guillaume or Wilfried, were already explaining on the plane that the preparatory work done beforehand with their teacher had to be “completed” by this “concrete” relocation to the “field.” Others, Arthur and Jordan mentioned, chose to abstain out of “fear of being shocked.” However, all knew they would return marked by this day designed to bring them closer to the “real,” however unbearable it might be. “Seeing” and sharing “the emotion of suffering” to better be able to “narrate it afterwards,” concluded Alexandra and Florian on their part.
Upon arriving at the site, these youths discover the extent of the Final Solution facilities put in place by Reynard Heydrich under Himmler’s orders: several km² between Auschwitz I, the original camp whose command was entrusted to Rudolf Hoess, Auschwitz II situated in Birkenau established at the end of March 1941 initially to accommodate prisoners from the Nazi offensive in the Soviet Union, soon followed by a third at Monowitz, intended to produce rubber for IG Farben. “A killing factory,” admits Willie, who spontaneously draws a parallel between the geometric systematicity of the constructions and that, equally relentless, of the extermination of the Jews.
This Birkenau camp may have disoriented them with its immensity. The precise presentations by the guides, with abundant details about the inhumane conditions of survival for those not immediately struck down at their “selection,” might have clashed with a kind of sanitization of this space due to the legitimate desire to preserve the buildings as they were. Behind the apparent tranquility of what, to some of them, looked like a “park,” the students perceived the underlying horror. The “kadish” (prayers for the dead) recited by visiting adults sitting directly on the rails from which the last convoys disembarked, undoubtedly reminded them of this underlying historical reality. The enigma of the wooden inclined pallets in one of the barracks that no guide could elucidate remains.
In the afternoon, devoted to visiting the original Auschwitz I camp, provoked stronger reactions from the young visitors from Nice. The 28 blocks of this “Stammlager,” although converted into museums, did not prevent any of the participants from escaping the atmosphere of a terrible human tragedy, evidenced merely by the presence, as bulky in number as it was disturbing to the mind, of the most familiar objects to the disappeared prisoners: burst open suitcases, personal belongings, soiled clothes and shoes, not to mention the letters and photos that cover entire walls. A sculpture represents Jewish prisoners that some of their fellow believers called “Muslims”: not because of their crouched position reminiscent of prayer as one guide mistakenly explained, but by their attitude of surrender, their psychological submission to the torturers (Islam means “submission”), as pointed out by the more resistant.
As this journey of memory progresses, the teenagers feel almost this “shame” spoken of by the former deportee Primo Levi. He describes how the gaze of the Russian liberating soldiers reflected back at them the feeling they themselves had tried to forget due to their “human flattening.” ([[3)- In “The Truce” (Primo Levi 1963) quoted by Serge Tisseron, “La Honte, Psychanalyse d’un lien social”, Coll. “Psychismes”, Editions Dunod, 2ème édition, 2007, 232 p., 25 Euros.]]). Echoing a universal moral, the visit concludes at the first chamber where the lethal Zyklon B gas, which killed millions of deportees, was first experimented. Just a few dozen meters away stands the former bourgeois home of Rudolph Hoess. Between the two, the gallows where he was hanged in 1947.
On this largest death camp the world has ever known, the students from Nice will no longer entertain merely theoretical ideas. This trip has ultimately been much more than a field study. It may have been, perhaps unbeknownst to them, a true inner experience. They can now bear triple testimony: that of the living against the dead. That of a voice against silence. That of memory against forgetting.
