What do we mean when we say that something is unimaginable? Is it that something is beyond comprehension? Or is it simply something that we don’t want to be put in the position of contemplating?
As I’ve thought about this, I’ve realized that there is a big difference between the two alternatives. For example, for someone who isn’t blind, explaining colors to a blind person might be unimaginable. Just try it – explain what blue is without referring to things that are blue.
On the other hand, men are always told that they can’t possibly understand the pain a woman experiences in childbirth. The closest we men can come to that sort of pain is supposedly the pain of having to wait for a kidney stone to pass. Having suffered through three episodes of kidney stones, I can safely say that I do not want to spend one second of my life thinking about, let alone reliving, those experiences. If that’s what childbirth is like, while I might not be able to specifically identify with what a woman goes through, I can maybe better conceive of what that experience would be like. The unimaginable becomes imaginable and I don’t want to think too much about it.
I’ve been traveling around Eastern Europe these past several weeks, and I’ve come face to face with the transformation of the unimaginable to not only the imaginable, but also to the tangible.
I began my travels in Bulgaria. I’m not sure why I chose Bulgaria in retrospect, except for the fact that I had never been there before. Landing in Sofia was like stepping through a time portal back to the 1970’s or 1980’s. There was an overall grimness to the city and the people that gave me a sense of what life must have been life during those decades. Nothing is more depressing than going to see “Mamma Mia” in Bulgarian with a crowd of people who don’t react to jokes or sing along with songs. I lasted through the first act and left at intermission.
But that’s not what impacted me the most. I was walking through a flea market over the weekend and found vendors with tables filled with Nazi memorabilia. Cigarette lighters, SS insignia, knives, medals – everything imaginable adorned with a gothic swastika. To say I was taken aback would be a massive understatement; honestly, I couldn’t put the feelings I experienced into words. I tried to minimize it – after all, American soldiers came home with Nazi trophies at the end of World War II. Yet this felt distinctly different; it was nostalgia, not evidence of defeat. The idea that people would look back fondly on the Nazi era had been unimaginable, but there it was, in enameled pins and inscribed cigarette cases.
I found memorials to mass murders of Jews in Hungary. Later, I went to the Baltics – Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia – and cycled through lots of open fields and seascapes. Very idyllic. Until I began stopping at sites of World War II atrocities against Jews – mass graves, unkempt graveyards, remains of internment camps and monuments to those killed (both Jews and Russian soldiers) during the war. And there it was again. That feeling that all of sudden the horror of World War II became relatable and real.
All of that paled before my experiences in Poland. In Warsaw, I visited what had been the Ghetto during the war and went to a museum about the Jewish experience in Poland, and another about the Warsaw Uprising that was quelled by the Nazis. There were markers everywhere – for the Polish women who were taken to slave labor camps, or who gave their lives during the Warsaw Uprising, a marker for the bunker used by the Jewish Combat Organization during that Uprising – Jews who killed themselves in lieu of being taken prisoner by the Nazis, the Umschlagplatz where Jews were herded into trains heading for the Treblinka concentration camp, and so many more monuments and memorials.
Perhaps one of the most impactful exhibits I visited was devoted to the Oneg Shabbat underground movement that kept notes and other documents describing the atrocities committed by the Nazis. Those notes were stuffed into milk cans and other containers and buried in the hopes they would be discovered and a record of the Nazi’s actions would be preserved. They were.
I don’t know how to describe the anticipation I felt about visiting Auschwitz-Berkenau outside of Krakow. I can’t say I was looking forward to it, but it felt almost like a pilgrimage I needed to make. I wanted to keep things unimaginable; I thought that, if I could see the camp, I would get a sterilized, unemotional sense of what life must have been like for its prisoners and could avoid having to put myself in their shoes.
To say I failed miserably would be a huge understatement. It was surreal walking under the famous “Arbeit Macht Frei” sign leading into the camp. There’s that famous line (with apologies to atheists and agnostics) that there are no atheists in foxholes. I was an American Jew with liberal sensibilities finding myself reciting the Shema – the centerpiece of Jewish prayer and the ultimate declaration of faith, affirming the oneness of God – virtually every time I entered one of the remaining buildings. I completely disconnected from my emotions when I walked through a gas chamber and attached crematorium; I videoed the experience which, in retrospect, was probably a way of putting something between myself and the horror of what I was looking at.
There was a wall of photos of prisoners brought to the camp with their dates of arrival and dates of death. My concept of life in concentration camps that I developed through books and movies was completely shattered. Most of the photos I saw showed that the life span of a prisoner being delivered to Auschwitz was a matter of mere months. The vast majority of Jewish deportees (80-85%) – including children, mothers with young children, the elderly and those deemed unfit for heavy physical labor – were murdered in the gas chambers within a few hours of arrival. For the minority selected to work as forced laborers, the life span was generally only 2 to 3 months.
My mind reeled. How could that be? What about those movies that showed prisoners surviving for years and ultimately being liberated? Pure fiction.
I had seen evidence of the genocide in Rwanda, and I would later see evidence of the genocide (the “ethnic cleansing”) during the division of Yugoslavia in the early 1990’s. I wanted the inhumanity necessary to foster genocide to remain unimaginable, but I was being presented over and over again with the tangible evidence of humanity’s capacity to be inhumane.
I’m still sorting through my feelings about all of these things. I no longer have the protection of characterizing all this history as unimaginable. I don’t want to conceive of it, and I want to believe that these things are aberrations and not a true representation of humanity’s capacity for extreme cruelty and disregard for life. But I don’t know how anyone can come away from these experiences feeling confidence about humanity’s ability to live in goodness and love.
And that’s the challenge. Even though the unimaginable has become tangible for me, I think back to my time in Bhutan and my discussions with my guide about how humans are all the same. We are all in pursuit of happiness, and we all share the same fears, doubts and self-criticisms. When it comes down to it, the precepts of all of the religions I have learned about during my gap year are pretty much the same – accept that humans will stumble and do horrible things to one another, but that doesn’t make humanity evil. Hate the sin, not the sinner. I am learning how important it is to choose love over hate, tolerance over judgment, and feelings over dispassion.
Before my gap year, I avoided thinking about the “big picture.” It was easier to focus on the things that were immediately in front of me: family, job, money, comfort. One of the biggest changes I have noticed during all this travel is my ever-increasing desire to gain an understanding of myself, the world and my place in it. Maybe I can’t change the world, but I can change my contribution to it. I have a long way to go, but I’d like to believe the path is becoming ever clearer.
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