I'm hoping to visit Krakow in September and already the silly tourist worries arise: what's the food like? What's a zloty worth? Is there a train from the airport? Just how do you pronounce dziekuje?
But the biggest tourist worry is: will I take photographs at Auschwitz? I want to go there, to visit what this programme calls 'the most infamous place on earth', but how will I react when I arrive? Will I shuffle around on the cobbles, stepping back to get a snap of that dreadful metal sign? Will I trample over the tracks to capture the gateway the trains went through? Everyone else does it. A Google Image search proves it; everyone is taking the same pictures over and over again. There are even 'Auschwitz selfies'. And I'm terrified of doing that. I'm terrified of being a tourist.
You can even wander into the camp via Google Streetview, which seems disrespectful, but what's more disrespectful is when you wander back out again and see signs for restaurants and toilets. People need to eat but must they eat right here? And how can they have an appetite, having just left that place? But perhaps they had the hot dog before they went in, and were still wiping the sauce off their sticky hands as they walked in through the gate?
So I don't know how I'll act when I get there. Will I be silent and reverential or overwhelmed by history and snapping pictures and checking in on Facebook. Maybe I'll even dash straight to those hot dog stalls when I emerge and grab three, just out of sheer animal joy that I'm alive. Just to prove the simple fact that I'm free and have money jingling in my pocket.
There's no way to predict how we'll behave when faced with such a terrible place. Even some Jews in post-war Israel didn't know how to properly respond to it - if there can be such a thing as a 'proper' response. Touched by Auschwitz (BBC2) told the stories of six survivors of the camp and the first one was Halina Birenbaum. She fled to Tel Aviv after the war, expecting to be greeted with warmth and understanding. Instead, she was faced with hostility. 'You just followed like sheep!' she was told by Jews who'd never known the Nazi threat. 'Why didn't you defend yourselves? It's a disgrace.'
This was a shock to me. For a Jew to have escaped Auschwitz and then be faced with scorn and aggression in Israel was unsettling, and it was a very clever way to start this programme, showing us that 'Auschwitz' is not simply the black and white images we've all seen a thousand times, and not just the sad stories we all think we know. In that kind of familiarity lies complacency and this opening story made such familiarity impossible.
The next story did not have the unpleasant element of Halina's but was equally as surprising. Max Epstein was just a boy when imprisoned but was gutsy and bold. His family seem to have inherited his spiky attitude as we saw him talking to his pregnant daughter-in-law and she says she was told, 'You're carrying in your tummy Max's victory over Hitler.' What a fine way to triumph.
This you-can't-catch-me attitude saw Max through the camp and he then went on to do military service in Israel and then have a career as a professor in Chicago. His entire life, after Auschwitz, has been about success and hard work and driving forward. Even his unborn grandchildren are seen as 'victories', not fluffy bundles of joy.
But Max is not a hard man. This is where the programme again turns your expectations upside down. 'I believe in kindness,' he says and tells us kindness is his philosophy and, yes, he developed that philosophy in Auschwitz. He recalls one compassionate German guard and says, 'the smallest act of kindness appeared like a spark. I choose to remember the sparks.'
So he took the philosophy of kindness from that terrible place and also managed to preserve a sense of humour. When his grandchildren ask why his arm is tattooed he says it's so it can be returned to him if it gets lost.
We continued to have our expectations upset as the next survivor wasn't Jewish. This was Hermann Hollenreiner, not an 'Aryan' German as the name suggests, but a Gypsy. He seemed quite burly and gruff but, when he spoke, it was to say, with desperate honesty, 'I can't understand how I'm still alive.'
At this point I was glad not be reviewing this programme live, as I had to stop here for a while. I had to abandon it and return later after making tea, after texting my sister, after unloading the washing machine: simple, boring things. Simple, boring things I was tearfully glad to be able to do.
And the programme did seem to emphasise the joy of ordinary things. With Freda Wineman, the last contributor, we saw her slicing green beans into a colander and picking fruit in her garden. She was preparing a family meal. With Tadeusz Smreczynski, he sat at the dining table with his family and his grandson said he hopes to be like him one day. There were so many scenes of families gathering to break bread together, to love and respect and comfort one another, and I think Max Epstein would agree these are yet more victories over Hitler, ones which happen every day across the world.
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