Category: Adventure

I hate the word “evil” for two reasons: (1) because of its religious connotations and (2) because its definition is relative and constantly changing. Same goes with “sin”. Two words with definitions that change depending who is in power.

Every culture, every civilization, every person, defines evil in different ways. Evil is whatever the people in power decide is bad for the whole, or for themselves.

That being said, sometimes no other word can be used in its place. I don’t think there’s much doubt that Auschwitz was an evil place.

The erry emptiness of these sites chilled me to the bones. In particular Auschwitz II – Birkenau. Deep in my skin the grotesque inhumanness of the events that took here disgusted my entire being.

Our guide told stories of the victims, the perpetrators, the justifications, and the people who stood by and watched.

Prisoner’s belongings were sorted: valuable sent to Berlin, pots and pans given to the colonizers.

In a museum a room of over 8000 shoes, another with thousands of luggage bags, one with zillions of pairs of glasses, and another full hair, “just a small sample of the 80,000 or more that were found after the war,” said our guide.

Auschwitz II – Birkenau is a sort-of extension camp close to Auschwitz built when the gas chamber capacity of killing 400 people a day wasn’t enough. Birkenau increased efficiency ten-fold – now 4000 prisoners could be executed each day. Plans were to increase that another ten times over with the continual expansion of the camps.

We walked along the tracks where trainloads of people were shipped from Amsterdam, Hungary, all around Europe, brought to Auschwitz to suffer in the most unthinkable ways.

“Which bed would you have preferred?” asked our guide.

I looked at the three levels of stark wooden beds lining up next to each other along both sides of the building – a wooden fixture designed to be a stable for horses. Each level of king-size bed shared by twenty-or-so people.

“The top?” Lisa suggested. “Because heat rises?”

“That’s right,” said our guide, “also because those on the lowest shared their bed with rats, and worse. Most prisoners had malnutrition and chronic diahorhiea so the lower the bunk you slept in the more people’s shit you were surrounded by.”

At the end of the tracks stood two gas chambers, or what was left of them. After the war the Nazis attempted to destroy the evidence of the crimes they’d committed.

How did humanity come to commit such horrors? How did Hitler get away with it?

“For a starters it was the economic system,” explained our guide. “After world war one the poor people voted for extremist parties, in particular those who blamed the Jews for their poverty. They were said to be animals. Sub-humans.”

“At first they were sent here for reasons like missing a day of work, or reading the paper or listening to the radio. Then they were put to work in the fields, digging, or as cooks or in factories. Most only lasted a few weeks or months because of the conditions of the food, sleeping, work and lack of hygiene.” Our guide brought us to photos of prisoners attached to their date of birth, date of arrival and date of death.

“Over time, it just got worse. It is hard to know the number of people who suffered and died. Women, disabled people, and those old or sick, were often not even registered.”

We were shown the gas chambers.

“Prisoners were told to go to strip naked and go into a ‘bathroom’, which was actually a gas chamber, and together they suffocated and watched each other suffering and die. After that the bodies were torched.”

How did seemingly good normal people stand by or even play roles in the atrocities?

I remembered my Opa’s stories of the German occupation of Holland. Everyone had to wear identification cards. Jews had ones with big J’s on them. One day your friend was there, the next he’d have been taken away – brought to factories in Germany. Not just Jews, it could be anyone. But mostly it was Jews.

I remembered stories Opa told of working for the Underground, helping them make fake IDs for the Jews. Stories of food rations, and of eating horrible-tasting biscuits made from tulip buds just to survive. I guess there were a number of people didn’t stand back and watch.

The big question I was left with was why?

What did Hitler or the Nazi’s have to gain by killing off the Jews? Was it just a way to unite the rest of the people in a common cause? Was it about power? Can it be traced back to Hitler’s childhood – did a Jew pull his hair and steal his money?

“It makes you wonder what evil things we don’t notice today,” said Lisa. “Will future generations look back at us and ask how we stood back and let something else happen?”

Poverty and hunger? Environmental destruction? Genocides? Wars over resources? Israel/Palestine?

Which situations are we too involved? Which are we not involved enough? What will future generations think of us?

What is good and what is evil now might be different in the future. I guess all we can do is constantly question our definitions, debate what we think to be “virtue” and try our best not to let atrocities like Auschwitz ever happen again.

“Give yourself time to scratch your head,” advised Prof Stuart Rees on one of our CPACS sailing trips down in Jervis Bay. These last few months I did not listen to this advice.

I have lived the last few months in a mad rush. I have packed up my life and put it in my grandma’s garage. Now I’m in Stockholm, on route to a conference in Krakow, Poland, and (after holiday in Europe) onto work at a university in North Carolina, USA, for the next 4 months.

Sitting in the airport awaiting my friend’s arrival, I can see the wisdom in Rees words.

I may have accomplished a lot these last few months – well at least in terms of words on pages and chapters and articles close to publishing – but in the process I lost something. In the rush to meet deadlines something had to go.

Besides pressing the pause button on my blog for a few weeks, I also pressed pause on the reflective process that allows a person to join the dots between the things they already know and the things they are learning. Whatever I learned these last few months feels as though it is lost in a blurred area of my brain. I was doing too many things, too fast, without even a second of time to ponder the ideas I was learning, summarising, and formulating into a chunk of writing.

Meeting one deadline after the other I have arrived at the end of the race with hardly a memory of the beautiful scenery I saw along the way. That being said I did finish the race. I upgrade from a MPhil to a PhD which might not sound like much but was quite an accomplishment, and was probably worth the head-spin.

During the twenty-something hour flight I observed my mind acting like a computer trying to process an overload of information. Dizzy from the whirlpool of ideas it has processed and outputted, my brain struggled to catch up with my new location in time and space.

It’s a strange feeling now that the rush of moving out of an apartment, saying goodbye to loved ones, finishing up work projects, and packing a backpack is finished.

Here I am, sitting in an airport with no deadlines and an uncertain future.

I sit, I wonder, where will life’s adventure take me next? And I scratch my head.

Imagine a world where being 180cm, 60kg, with long blonde hair, makes you AVERAGE. In Scandinavia, for the first time in my life, I felt short. It was a strange feeling. Used to towering over people and always kind-of standing out because of my height, blending into the crowd provoked a new stream of thought.

It got me thinking about my identity, and the definitions of “self” in relation to “other”. While we tend to be drawn to people that are similar to ourselves, we tend to define ourselves by the points of difference.

In Japan I had a very strong identity – not only was a foot taller than most people around me, I also had very different hair, eye, skin colour, facial features, etc.

In South America my identity based on difference was much like Japan – eyes looking towards me with a sense of curiosity.

In Sydney, and even in Paris and most countries I’ve visited, I’m still considered tall, and combined with a quirky hair cut and dress sense, eyes tend to look my way.

In Stockholm and Copenhagen I blended into the crowd more than I have ever before. My ego wasn’t really sure what to make of it. On one hand it was nice to feel unnoticed, to feel I am just like everyone else. On the other hand I started to question: what is it that makes me me?

It made me realize that the characteristics and stories that define me are completely inseparable from the people I am surrounded by.

I guess it’s the same for lots of ways we define our identities:

If you get the highest grades class B you feel smart. If you get the lowest grades in class A you feel dumb, even if you are smarter than all of class B.

If you have a house and a car, but they are not as nice as your friend’s house and car then you feel poor. If you have food and your friend doesn’t, you feel rich.

Surrounded by beautiful people you feel ugly, surrounded by beautiful people you feel ugly.

You think your “individual identity” is you, but really you don’t know who “you” are without knowing something about the people around you.

Everything is RELATIVE, even “YOU” and “ME”.

So that was my take-away lesson from Stockholm and Copenhagen. Above and below are some photos of Lisa, my friend of over twenty-years, and our little adventures in Copenhagen and Stockholm.

Soon I am off to Europe followed by the United States, with a very big question mark surrounding my return date. I’m booked to leave 9 weeks from yesterday and be home just in time for Christmas… but I really have no idea what my future holds. Exciting as this sounds, when it comes the details, life in the 21st century can make preparations and decisions surrounding uncertainties a massive anxiety-filled pain in the butt.

From getting my scooter Provisional-license (if I don’t I have to do a 2 day Learner course again), writing 30,000 words towards a PhD, cutting out 100,000 words from my novel, finishing up projects at work, lecturing, marking, packing, preparing, and filling out forms. And as fast as my “to do” list gets longer, the decisions grow harder.

From the little things like “do I pay-out or defer the remaining 6 month phone and internet contracts?”, to the bigger things like “do pack up my little studio apartment, or should I try to find someone to sublet it?”

I hate decisions. I like making decisions in one grand sweep. It’s not always the smartest move, but neither are the choices made after days or weeks of tedious weighing scales.

I still have a couple of months, so maybe if I don’t think about it the answers and solutions will just come to me. Hopefully same will go with my “to do”s and “goodbyes”. I guess all I can do is my best, work hard, enjoying the moments along the way. Hopefully the future will take care of itself.

Anyway if there are less blog entries for a while, then you know why… and in the blink of an eye it will be time to fly!!!