A man with a broom. How hopeless his task is.

Auschwitz. Originally only the name of a peaceful village, but after the Second World War synonymous with the hell people are able to create for each other. How can you make a piece of theatre about it, you wonder.

Hotel Modern have succeeded. They’ve recreated the camp in miniature on stage, and populated it with thousands of miniature people: puppets in concentration camp and SS uniforms. You experience one day in the camp. You have a birds-eye view, and because all the events are filmed close up with a hand-held camera, and the images are projected on the back wall of the stage, at the same time you’re face to face with the leading actors, puppets eight centimetres tall.

There are no words. You do hear a wide range of sounds: the train, the birds, the hammering and sweeping of the prisoners, and the endless, endless, endless rain of blows with which an exhausted man is beaten to death.

The members of theatre group Hotel Modern, Pauline Kalker, Arlene Hoornweg and Herman Helle, move calmly among the buildings, like demigods, invisible to the tiny people. They move the puppets using long, thin sticks. One sweeps the camp. From a distance you see how big it is, how desolate. How hopeless the task is. Sweep, sweep, sweep. Sweep, sweep, sweep. From close up you see him labouring. Sweep, sweep, sweep. The gods put him in another part of the camp. Sweep, sweep, sweep. You know there’s no end to it, until death strikes.

The entire production is similarly imbued with the real horrors. There is no attention for what we, well-fed outsiders, assume to be the most important things: the red glow from the chimneys, the shouting, the dogs. There is no sensationalism. Here the horrors of death and tedium rule, of massive scale and denial of the individual. Occasionally something threatens to make you laugh: for example, when you see groups of prisoners are mounted in dozens on boards. But then you suddenly realise this shows exactly how the people were treated: not as people, but as a group of nameless bodies. Sometimes you get bored, for example when to the cheerful and banal strains of the Radetzky March, board after board after board after board, prisoners are pushed through the gate with Arbeit macht frei. It goes on and on. There’s no end to it. But that, you suddenly think, was exactly what happened. It went on and on. Monotonously. Mechanically. When the boards are then piled up and taken into the camp, and here and there put underneath a barracks like a piece of cheese under a cover, it might seem funny for three seconds. But again you immediately understand that’s how it went. Not literally, but in essence.

And there’s more. The almost transparent bodies of naked people, the piles of shoes and clothes, the heaps of bones, the hungry eyes and the sound of the food bowls being endlessly licked clean. The drunken parties of the SS soldiers. The lonely person in the night who ends his suffering by throwing himself onto the electrified fence. The hangings. The man who drops the Zyklon B into the chute. The way the cans are stacked, as they would be in reality, some of them upside down. The work of real people. The gas chambers, and the prisoner who mops the floor between “loads”. The squeaking as prisoners slide the bodies of their fellow prisoners into the ovens. Body on bier. Bier forwards. Oven door open. Body inside. Oven door shut. Bier back. Body on bier. Bier forwards… Auschwitz.

The following day I have to go to Rotterdam again, my hometown. I cross the square in front of the station, which is now a huge building site. I only know Rotterdam as a building site. After all, the heart of it was bombed. There’s sand on the ground. A young man is sweeping. When he sees me, he stops. He comes up to me and says, “I’m really doing my best, you know!” “I can see,” I reply. Later I see a documentary about concentration camps. A survivor says his father was given a job at the camp he was in. He had to sweep barracks. There is a metre-and-a-half of Auschwitz on my bookshelf. I know you can’t know what it was like there. But now I do know better. And a man with a broom will never just be a man with a broom to me again.

February 2007