Movies vs. Reality: “The Passion” is Mute Next to Auschwitz’s Quiet Power

KRAKOW, Poland–Mel Gibson's new movie, “The Passion of the Christ” opened last week in this venerable Polish city, playing to a rapt audience at the refurbished Kiev Cinema, a large movie house with a wide screen, good sound system and well-padded seats. Most of the audience sat transfixed until the last credit had rolled.

I'd come to Poland on other business, and I tagged along with two acquaintances to the movie that evening because I was curious. Like many, I'd followed the debate since “The Passion” began its promotional warm-up this past winter. I knew there was friction over Mr. Gibson's ugly portrayal of the Jews, especially at a time when in many parts of the world anti-Semitism is again on the rise. I'd read about the scenes in which Jesus is scourged and crucified–with the most expert special effects that 21st-century filmmaking, on a $25 million budget, can deliver.

What I had not anticipated was that “The Passion,” in its frenzy to convey suffering, would inspire an urge not to weep, but chiefly to wince. Whatever faith or beliefs individual moviegoers may bring to the theater, what transpires in the film itself is a Hollywood marathon of dizzyingly bloody close-ups, some in slow motion, some moving along at a music video clip, all set to a hyperventilating score of hypnotic drumbeats and soaring chants.

It was a jarring contrast to a place I had visited earlier that same day–a place of silence. Located about 40 miles west of Krakow, this site is known to the Poles as Oswiecim. To the rest of the world it is better known by its German name: Auschwitz.

In the 59 years since the liberation of the Nazi death camps, so much has been said about Auschwitz that it may seem there's nothing to add. Perhaps. But some things need saying again and again. Some places need visiting by every generation, and not solely because there are crackpots at the extreme, such as Mel Gibson's father, Hutton Gibson, who would have us believe that the Holocaust was mostly fiction (his logic being, apparently, that the Nazis lacked the fuel to burn the bodies of six million Jews). We tend to remember the Nazi death camps today as a sort of shorthand for evil. I wonder how many Americans contributing to “The Passion's” $200 million take at the box office could find Auschwitz on the map.

It matters to go there. With Poland now a free country, the trip is easy, even if it is fraught with some incongruous touches by the enterprising Polish tourist industry. In Warsaw, a travel agency in the lobby of my hotel was offering day trips for “Auschwitz-Birkenau Sight-Seeing.” In Krakow, I picked up a flier advertising a trio of local attractions: “rafting,” “salt mine”–and “Auschwitz.” At least it gets you there.

Auschwitz was just one hub in the sprawling system of concentration and extermination camps operated by the Nazis across Europe during World War II, but it was a big one. Early in the war, the Nazis realized that the original Auschwitz camp, with its one small gas chamber, could not begin to kill human beings on the scale they desired. Just down the road, they set up the vast Auschwitz II-Birkenau complex, equipped with four big gas chambers. At Auschwitz and Birkenau some 1.5 million human beings were murdered, most of them Jews. Those not dispatched immediately to the gas chambers served as slave laborers, usually dying within months, if not weeks, from starvation, exposure, overwork and disease.

Today there is no Technicolor gore to be viewed at Auschwitz or Birkenau. There is no music-swollen sound track. There is a short black-and-white film. There are modest kiosks at the entrances, selling books and postcards, and there are personal guides (if wanted). At Auschwitz, there are exhibits documenting a system designed to utterly dehumanize all who were forced to enter.

Prisoners spared from immediate gassing in order to perform slave labor were stripped not only of their clothes and belongings, but even of their names–replaced by tattooed numbers. A guide explains that when the camps were opened, some of the surviving children used for experiments by the notorious doctor Josef Mengele answered only to numbers; they no longer knew their own names.

A South Korean pastor I know, Benjamin Yoon, who specializes in discovering and disclosing the horrors of North Korea (a nightmare state itself), visited Auschwitz the day after I went there. He tells me he got as far as the exhibit of shoes taken off by people about to enter the gas chambers. He began wondering about the individual stories associated with each pair-and could not bear it. He had to leave.

At Auschwitz, near the infamous sign over the gate, ARBEIT MACHT FREI–work makes you free–is the spot where Nazis forced a Jewish band to play, the better to keep starving prisoners marching in step, and easier to count, as they filed past. In the basement of Block 11, a prison within the camp, are cells designed for specific forms of torment, such as the “standing cells”–brick compartments too narrow for prisoners crammed in three or four together to do anything but stand, a punishment that killed many through exhaustion or asphyxiation.

There were slatted benches for flogging the inmates, and washrooms where prisoners were ordered to strip before being marched into an adjacent courtyard, lined up in twos, naked, against a wall, and shot in the head. Then the next pair was lined up. By this wall, where some 20,000 people were murdered, visitors still leave flowers.

Birkenau, far larger and more ruined, is desolate; quiet except for the wind. Barbed wire still surrounds the camp. The railroad tracks are still there, laid right through the main gate in order to efficiently unload the prisoners close to the gas chambers.

Even in early March, Birkenau's expanse was numbingly cold, with slippery sheets of ice under the snow piled up around the few drafty wooden barracks still standing. These structures were designed as barns for a few dozen horses, but then used to house between 400 to 800 people at a time, packed onto slatted pallets stacked three-high and infested with vermin that carried diseases such as typhus. Among the buildings still standing is a latrine where thousands of prisoners had the opportunity to be herded through only twice a day, fighting for brief access to icy water and the round holes set at close intervals in the long concrete benches that served as toilets.

At the back, beyond the barracks, were the gas chambers. The Nazis tried to destroy this evidence, blowing up the chambers and crematoria before retreating. But you can peer down into the basement-level ruins of one of the rooms where prisoners were ordered to undress before going naked to the gas. Next to it are remnants of a blasted gas chamber, in this season softly topped with snow. Nearby are a set of memorial slabs inscribed in various languages: “Forever let this place be a cry of despair and a warning to humanity. . . .”

I have never seen a place so evil.

Nor am I sure how to return at this point to the subject of a movie I must assume set out to depict what can be felt everywhere in the stark remains and devastating silence under the gently falling snow at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Ms. Rosett is a fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and the Hudson Institute. Her column appears here and in The Wall Street Journal Europe on alternate Wednesdays.