about 30 minutes into my overnight journey to krakow, the train came to an abrupt stop. shortly thereafter, one of the conductors came running down the hall, stopping at each couchette to yell something in czech. I turned to the man sharing my couchette and sheepishly asked if he spoke english… he shook his head and looked out in to the hall. A minute or so passed and I noticed other passengers starting to gather in the hall and peer out of the windows. I went to the hall, pulled down a window myself and peered out in to the dark night.
About 20 meters to the left, men with flashlights were running along the train track. as they flew past, I noticed they were dressed in orange reflective jackets… and looked strikingly like paramedics. I turned my head to the right and peered along the track. about a car and a half away, a few flashlights were waving about rapidly. as my eyes adjusted, I noticed a crowd of people standing around something near the track… a moment or two later I realized that the train had hit a person.
A few teenagers were standing near me… and thinking they probably spoke some english, I approached them to see if they knew what had happened. The young man’s sharp ”nah” to my inquiry made it clear that I wasn’t going to find anything else out. I resumed my perch near the window and watched the medics work. over the next half hour, about a dozen people arrived on the scene… policemen, firefighters, train employees, a photographer, and more paramedics. a small crowd had also formed on an overpass above the stopped train.
fellow passengers spoke to each other in quiet, foreign phrases as more train conductors moved through the train. about an hour later, the team of paramedics loaded the person on a stretcher and headed along the train tracks toward the overpass. I could see the man’s bloody face, bathed in artifical light from the train and flashlights, as the group passed beneath my window. a stressfull hour later, which involved me having to leave and return to the train, I laid my head down and we were back on our way to krakow.
but as I lay there, I couldn’t help feel something strange about what I had just witnessed. days earlier I was in berlin and I’d spent a day visiting the sachsenhausen concentration camp on the outskirts of the city. It had been an alltogether sad experience… to see the physical remains of a place where so many thousands of souls painfully and cruelly left this world. I could still remember the eerie shivers that went up my spine as I walked passed the ruins of the camp’s gas chambers in the early winter darkness. and yet… this evening I had just witnessed over a dozen individuals work ferverishly to save the life of a single man… of unknown race or creed or name.
how could both of these situations… both of these realities coexist? how was it possible to witness the ravishings of genocide… and the struggle to save a single human life within days of each other?
and as I type this now, from the floor of a dark flat in poland… I’ve just spent the day visiting the auschwitz and birkeneau concentration camps. I’m no closer to being able to reconcile the remains of these atrocities with the what seems like man’s natural desire to protect life. I know that there’s a lot more to this duality… and my discussion’s rather simple… but it was so clearly demonstrated to me by these brief experiences. For man, in all of his capacity for love and compassion, is equally capable of unspeakable and absolute evil… especially against his own.
and this potential for good and evil coexists in us all… both qualities equally capable of being manifested. For all the memorials built to victims in the world… new victims are made each day. does man learn from these lessons? world war I was once called the war to end all wars. the irony of this title is now obvious… but perhaps even more sorrowful, in that it was born out of hope… born out of the idea that man was indeed capable of learning from his mistakes. the images of the ruined crematoriums at birkeneau are still fresh in my mind… but weeks ago I traveled through a nation that experienced bloodshed and ethnic cleansing as little as 13 years ago.
and though it can be perceived as convenient or over-simplifying to take broad strokes at complex human issues… there still remains that basic characterstic of the man-beast… the light and dark sides of the human soul. both equally capable of realizing their potential.
as I left the barbed wire boundaries of auschwitz, I had a heavy heart… for the events that took place there… and the one that took place on the train.
