Memories of a trip to Auschwitz

Watching the 60th Anniversary coverage of the Liberation of Auschwitz has me thinking: is my generation the last ones to be born that have a real tangible connection to World War II?

The Veterans and survivors are dying off and as illustrated by Prince Harry Pothead - the generation that is only 12 years younger than myself views WWII as some part of ancient history; the same way that I might view the Irish Potato Famine or the Highland Clearances - I know they happened but they don't really mean anything to me.

I remember my Grandfather talking about fighting in North Africa and Italy, I remember my Mum and Dad talking about their experiences - My Mum was 11 years old in Glasgow (at the time heavily industrialized and heavily bombed), my Dad was in the Royal Signal Corp as a radio operator (something I'd think a lot about later as I started working with short-wave radio at the BBC). I listened to my Grandparents stories and my parents stories. I remember the clock that came from a Nazi Submarine that hung on the wall of my Grandfather's house and the leather belt and dagger with the Eagle atop of a Swastika on it. I built scale models of Spitfires, Hurricanes and ME 109's. WWII seemed real like it just happened yesterday.

I remember the corrugated iron roofs on houses in Glasgow built on the cheap after the war. I remember the concrete machine gun pill-box that looked out at the North Sea waiting for an invasion force from Norway. I took my first ever driving lesson on the runway of an old WWII base that had long since been deserted, the tin huts and derelict control tower were still standing. On my first ever trip to New York I sat next to an American who flew reconnaissance planes out of the same base. His recollections about the place seemed to be more about the girls in the nearby town of Crail than any Boys Own action stories.


In 1997 I found myself standing outside the gates of Auschwitz after stepping off the local train from Krakow to Oswiecim. It was my first trip to Poland and it seemed like the right thing to do.
The local train rolls along very slowly and seems to stop anywhere that has a house so someone can step onboard. I end up helping an old lady with her shopping climb up and she thanks me by talking to me in Polish all the way to Oswiecim, I don't understand what she is saying but I suspect it is along the lines of you must marry my voluptious daughter. No such luck...

When I was there, everything in Oswiecim was grey and crumbling. The post-Communist era had not brought any money to this part of Poland yet. It seemed to add to the overwhelming depression about the place.

This was my first visit to Auschwitz but not my first visit to a concentration camp. I had visited Dachau on a previous visit to Munich and had been suitably moved. Dachau is different though, it has been swallowed up by the city was a short bus ride from where I was staying. I could stand inside the camp and see houses where people lived.

Auschwitz is on the edge of town and the road was surrounded by long grass that was as tall as me. Everything seems to be designed to enhance the oppresiveness of the place.

Eventually you reach the gates that proclaim "Arbeit Macht Frei" ("Work Makes You Free.") and you are inside. My first thought was "Fuck, I took the train here!". This hit me when I was stepping over the old tracks that carried the victims here.

Ther second thought I had was that I was in the middle of the countryside on a summer's day and there were no birds singing, no signs of wildlife of any kind. This might have been my mind playing tricks but I was starting to freak out a bit.

I took the guided tour and survived only half of it. Half the museum is upstairs and half is downstairs. I saw the piles of spectacles and other souveniers taken from victims in the upstairs part. There is a room filled with suitcases, most of which have the victims name and address on the outside. I do not know what was downstairs. I could not go downstairs.

I don't know why, I don't believe in ghosts, but this place really got to me. I felt like I was having trouble breathing, I was tense and nervous, I had to get out. I left the tour and walked off on my own to the destroyed gas chambers. I felt cold (it was probably 90 degrees).

I am writing all of this from memory as I couldn't bring myself to take any pictures while I was there so if I remembered any of the physical details wrong please accept my apologies.

Prince Harry should have come here. He might have learned something (respect?) but what can you expect from a man whose family tree looks like a stump!

The "Eyes" have it.

Alright so I've been on a bit of a rant lately. Weather, cell-phones, New York, you name it! Basically it all comes down to this... Eyes.



These are some old pictures of my eyes taken by my specialist. Yesterday I got the procedure repeated (2 years later) and since I knew what was coming - I was able to be a little bit more observant and less nervous.

Firstly they dilate your pupils with iodine drops. This is really strange - it basically feels like you are very stoned but without the fun parts. Your eyes become super-sensitive and every light you see appears to explode like a little disco-ball. Wait, it gets better....

Once you are stoned enough, they shoot you up with a dye that allows them to take clearer pictures. I guess this dye coats the retina as everything you look at momentarily becomes very pink. It's a rose-tinted outlook but without the rose-tinted specs.

Oh and just to round it off, the first time you pee after this dye - your pee looks like mango juice.

incidentally, If anyone is wondering about the photos - the lines you see are the optic nerve and the dots are the pigmentation that is causing my blindness. The surface of the eye should look smooth, not lunar. When these pictures were taken I had lost 2/3 of my sight, the new pics will probably show a little bit more deterioration.

So that is basically how I spent today. Stoned and seeing flashing lights. I put Roky Erickson on my MP3 player on the way home and it all made sense. By the way, in case anyone is wondering, I haven't taken LSD in almost 10 years. Damn....

Taking the "Fun" out of "Fundamentalist"

They've started whining about the cartoons! Fucking idiots! And now Spongebob has a homosexual agenda! Can't we get back to the safe old days of Teletubbies... eh... no wait... they're gay too! Ah fuck 'em! At least Homer Simpson's arse is more real than Janet Jackson's tit ever will be!

Apathy is the new Ignorance.

So I saw my first fucked-up Iraq war veteran. Bottom-half of his leg missing, waving a red flag (in America that means "Stop" not "Communist") and holding a sign saying "Stop the War". People were streaming past him, ignoring him. I stopped for a second, read the sign, then streamed past too. There were other details on the sign but I couldn't read them all because: A) His handwriting was extremely bad. B) I didn't stop long enough to take it all in... just like everyone else. Apathy is the new Ignorance.

The Pentagon says there are over 10,000 American amputees already, just how many Iraqis are there? Truth is, no-one really knows because just like New Yorkers indifference to the Veteran, the world has an indifference to civilian casualties. Apathy is the new Ignorance.

Here are some pictures from Iraq you may not have seen on a 24-Hour News Channel near you.

Apathy is the new Ignorance. Don't die of Ignorance.

Blue Monday

So apparently Monday 24th of January is the most depressing day of the year. I spent it at home fighting a running battle with Dust Bunnies the size of small cats - in fact I think one of them may have been a small cat - it definitely moved!

The roads are open again after the first blizzard of 2005 and now the blackening process begins. Mountains of snow piled 10 feet high at the end of all the streets will slowly but surely turn black with dirt and soot. Put some Monopoly houses on them and they'll resemble miniature Scottish Mining villages.

It's one of my least favorite sights about living in New York (along with the "He-might-be-dead" sleeping homeless guy you always have to step over when you are traveling late-night alone on the subway). These mountains of shit will be with us until the weather warms up and in NYC that can be late-April!

Another side effect to all this snow and ice is the phenomenon of the electrified sidewalk. Ice and snow corroding electric wires under the street turning manhole covers and other lovely bits of metal you step on into little doggy electric chairs. There were two incidents last year - one girl died trying to rescue her dog, the other got the "NYC Department of Sanitation" logo branded on her side after falling of a skateboard. You gotta watch where you walk in this town!

Snowed in

There is a foot an'a half of snow outside. It is 18 degrees and there are gusts of 50 mph. I can't get to work even if I want to. I'm listening to the Andy Kershaw show on BBC Radio 3 and cleaning away in the back bedroom. Andy Kershaw might be the last great DJ on Radio now that John Peel has passed, you can tune into it here. Where else can you here Ukranian hip-hop tracks followed by Country followed by South African penny whistle players?

Missing the Monkey

So I took my own advice and stuck to English beers on Wednesday night. Fuck, never again! Boddingtons destroys me, I had forgotten that. Yesterday was Inauguration Day and the Monkey was sworn back in for another 4 years of fucking up the world. Thanks to Boddingtons I missed the whole thing! Sleep sleep and more sleep.

I do volunteer work once a month at a Food Coop and this morning I dragged my sorry arse out of bed at 5AM and struggled down there to pack pineapple rings and figs for 3 hours, during this time I heard snippets of the Monkey's speech! I cannot believe he made a bunch of reference to the "Sermon on the Mount", isn't this when Jesus said "Blessed are the Cheesemakers"? At least I guess that's what the Monkey heard... it obviously wasn't "Peacemakers" or in the Vice-Monkey's case "Pacemakers".

The Food Coop movement is a positivly Communist enterprise and possibly one of the great unsung heros of American life. Everyone is a volunteer, no labour overheads means cheaper food, most of it is organic and locally grown by small farmers. It is such a relief from the Tesco's and Walmart's of the world. I always wonder why I drag myself out of bed for this but when I get there and meet the other volunteers I remember: Karma

Ice Cold Beer

It's -12 degrees out and I'm starting to wonder why Americans don't drink warm beer the way the English do. I'm not the biggest fan of warm beer but a couple of cold, windswept months working in a coffin-dodger holiday camp on the Isle of Wight and it made a lot more sense to me. Old Speckled Hen was not just a name I gave to customers at the camp anymore.

Now I am in New York and I can walk into a bar from 12 below with an icicle hanging off my nose and bright pink ears only to be handed a glass that has been refrigerated in ice then filled with cold beer. This is why I only drink Guiness in the winter months, if they ever introduce "Ice-Cold Guinness" in the USA I think I'd become convinced Ernest Saunders was back in charge! How come he isn't in The Guinness Book of Records as the only person ever to recover from Alzheimer's disease? I mean Guinness know him after all....

Anyway I digress, it's fucking cold and the icebergs are starting to float down the Hudson River into the harbor, this is always one of my favorite sights. Last year was the coldest winter since I moved to New York 6 years ago (10th coldest on record) and it was really cool to be on the Staten Island Ferry watching it creak through the ice. It was also sad last year though as on January 10th the actor/writer Spalding Gray committed suicide by jumping in the water. They didn't find him until March. I think somewhere in the ice I was looking for him.

Stupid is as Stupid does.

I'm not gonna name names but the company I work for suck. I'm a satellite transmissions technician who spends half his day on the phone answering the stupidest questions ever dreamt up by some of the stupidest people on the planet; most of whom are earning more money than me.

I've always believed that if you have nothing intelligent to say then say nothing at all. Answering stupid questions all day definitely has an effect on you; eventually you will start acting stupid yourself. Because of this I am spending more and more time not talking, clam up before you fuck up!

Add this to my other disabilities, I have Usher syndrome , and you have The Pinball Wizard. The Deaf, Dumb and Blind Kid.

New York City is loud. I am deaf and I still say that the City is loud, I can only imagine what hearing-ear people think. You get used to the sirens, the horn honking and the noise of traffic but you never get used to morons screaming into cell-phones. It's even better now that everyone has hands-free headsets and appear to be walking down the street talking to themselves (sometimes I'm sure they are!). In the old New York, if you saw a guy walking down the street screaming to himself "What the fuck man? Sell Sell Sell!", you'd cross the street to avoid him. Now it's acceptable behavior? Why? Because we are all getting stupider.

Is it coincidence that we have a President in this country who proudly admits he does not read the newspaper? Is it a coincidence that he has been re-elected? I doubt it....

Mobile phones fry your brain, I think we should just admit it. The recent report that you should not give a mobile phone to anyone under 8 years old, unfortunately did not state whether you should give a phone to someone with the intelligence of an eight year old.

Welcome.

Hello and welcome to Buddha in the Beerglass. A blog dedicated to nothing other than the random thoughts of a blind-deaf Scottish guy living in a New York City under siege from the Christian Mullahs in Washington D.C.

The title of the blog comes from my belief that if you need to find a religion then it might as well be Buddhism as it seems to be the most inclusive and least judgemental of all the major organised beliefs out there.

I was raised Catholic and like all good Catholics, lapsed or otherwise, I like a drink. Hence the "Beer" in the title. I sometimes attend Meditation at the Shambhala Centre of New York but more often I can be found drinking at Swift's on East 4th Street.

This is not as contradictory as it sounds. The Shambhala school of Buddhism was founded by Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, a monk who escaped Tibet in 1959 and spent the rest of his life bringing Tibetan Buddhism to the West. He was a compatriot of Allen Ginsberg and by all accounts had a weakness for the wine and the women. Spanking the Monk... sounds good to me.

Anyway enjoy the shite that passes through here. If you are offended by anything I post, feel free to comment. If you are intrigued or amused then leave me alone and go start your own fucking blog.......