Trips That I Made to Very Different

¶ … trips that I made to very different places were Mexico City and the Auschwitz extermination camp in Poland, and I will describe the impressions that I remember best from these visits to two very different places. Mexico City stands out in my mind because it was my first trip to a foreign country, but Auschwitz is a place I cannot forget simply because of what it is and the evil that it represents -- and I mean that in the literal sense, because it's no exaggeration to say that evil is just in the very atmosphere of the place. I did see some terrible things in Mexico, too, but Auschwitz was always unique in my limited experience and in a category by itself. I did go back to Mexico more than once after that first visit, but had no desire ever to return to Auschwitz or anyplace like it, since it left me only with a feeling or mood of gray emptiness. I cannot describe it better than that. Auschwitz just sits by itself on the plains of Poland in surroundings that seem very isolated and desolate, and unlike the trip to Mexico I did not even feel like talking much about it afterward.

In Mexico City, I stayed at a $5 a night place called the Hotel Bolivar, which is near the Zocalo or main square, where they great cathedral is also located. That building was very impressive, full of Renaissance artwork as well as altars and statues made out of solid gold and silver -- just one indication of how much wealth was taken out of Latin America during colonial times. I later learned that the Native Americans had built all of these colonial building in the capital, over the ruins of Tenochtitlan. There was a guy from Germany staying at the hotel who told me that he wanted to avoid being drafted into the army and was simply staying overseas until he was past the draft age. If they stayed out of the country until they were 27 or 28 they would not have to serve, and this guy wanted nothing to do with the military. He also had some unusual Mexican friends, including a man named Alfredo who drove around in an expensive sports car, and I would not be surprised if they were involved in drug dealing. I didn't ask.

Later at the hotel, I met a journalist named Carlos wrote for a radical newspaper down there and wanted to show me some of the real conditions of the country. First he showed me the business of a middle class family who made t-shirts in a small factory in the basement of their house, and they seemed well-dressed, well-fed and content. Then he showed me the slums of the city, which went on mile after mile and took me into the one-room shack of a poor family with no furniture where they sat around eating on a dirt floor. I thought I had seen poverty before, but never anything like this, and I could never forget the smell of open sewage. In this area, people had no shoes, no decent clothes, not enough food and lived with flies, sewage and garbage. It was one of the shocks of my life and I never forgot it. I should mention many other things about my trip, such as the town of Tepotzlan in Morelos, where I saw a native curandera or wise women and climbing to the top the Pyramid of the Sun and the Pyramid of the Moon at the ancient city of Teotihuacan, but it was really the sights and smells of this slum thatmade the strongest impression on me.

I will never forget the visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland, which is actually two camps that are a few miles distant, with tour buses running regularly between them. Auschwitz I was the original concentration camp near the town, and I noticed that people were actually living in a number of the two and three-story red brick buildings that had been turned into apartments after the war. It occurred to me that someone would have to be very desperate for housing if they wanted to stay in a place like that, but then again there is even a Holiday Inn Auschwitz for the tourists and a McDonald's too. I walked around inside the gray concrete gas chamber at this camp, which is the only one still standing, and once again I noticed a smell that has always stayed with -- the smell of soot and ashes that still covered the walls. In this area the gallows where the commandant, Rudolf Hoess, was hanged after the war is still standing as well.

Auschwitz II-Birkenau was much larger, with barracks and barbed wire that seemed to stretch from horizon to horizon, and it must have been a walk of a mile or two from the main gate down the old railroad tracks to the ruins of the four large gas chambers and crematoria -- although these were all destroyed before the Russians captured the camp in January 1945. Behind those was another area that still had water tanks, a power plant and sewage treatment facility, for Birkenau really was a medium-sized city with all kinds of services, but its purpose was only genocide and slave labor.