On Monday, I got the incredible opportunity to travel across the border to Poland, and see the Auschwitz Museum and Memorial with my own eyes.
My team and I have been looking forward to visiting Auschwitz since the end of last month. However, as excited as I was, I wasn’t anticipating the visit to be anything more than another unique experience.
Being Jewish and of Eastern European dissent, the Holocaust did and does have a very prevalent role in my life. I learned about it every year in Hebrew School, watched several movies, read many books, did projects and reports, saw presentations and survivors speak, lit the memorial candle every year…etc. I was always aware of what happened, I was aware of how Hitler was able to so successfully deceive the world, I was aware of the atrocities, of the living conditions, and of the horrifying numbers of lives lost. Therefore, I expected our visit to Auschwitz to be a really unique opportunity in which I got to witness these facts in person.
However, I never expected it to impact me in the way and in the capacity that it did.
At around 12:30pm we boarded a small shuttle bus bound for Auschwitz, or Oswiecim, as it is known in Poland. The route from Krakow to Oswiecim took about 1.5 hours. For the first half of the ride I was perfectly fine, filled with an odd excitement to finally see this tragic site with my own eyes. However, as we traveled further and further away from big cities and civilization I found myself surrounded by the deep forests. The forests I saw in all the books and movies. The dark forests populated with tall, thin trees that stretched to the sky and seemed to expand for miles in all directions. The forest, that to me, symbolized isolation, desertion and fear. As I stared out the window, watching a plain of trees wiz past my eyes, my heart began to race. I couldn’t control it, and I wasn’t completely sure why or what was happening, but I felt a gut wrenching fear seep into my heart. As we got closer and closer to the museum, brown signs labeled ‘Oswiecim Museum’ began to appear on the side of the road, and my pulse accelerated. I was overwhelmed with legitimate petrification. My hands began to shake, my eyes began to well, and I found it hard to catch my breath. Why was I so scared? What was there to be afraid of? The war ended 70 years ago, the place I was headed to was merely a museum. Even now I don’t understand the fear that filled me in that moment, I don’t know where it came from, or how to justify it. All I know was is I wanted to turn around and run.
All of a sudden the bus driver yelled ‘Auschwitz Museum!” and my heart instantly sank into my gut. I clutched my belongings and climbed out of the vehicle. As soon as my feet hit the ground, my fear became unbearable, and I began to cry hysterically. I couldn’t catch my breath, I couldn’t walk, I couldn’t lift up my eyes. No part of me wanted to enter that camp. My squad mate Alexis, encouraged us to stop and pray, so we gathered off under the trees and asked the Lord to be with us throughout the next several hours.
Once I rounded the corner and saw the tourists and the visitor center, my fear subsided. Whatever spiritual discontent had acted up within me began to subside.
(Auschwitz I, Row of Barracks)
As the tour began I was overcome with my second emotion for the day, an unexplainable, overwhelming sense of empathy. Our tour guide led us through the unmistakable gates to Auschwitz I and began to explain to us the implementation of the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question”, and the “extermination” of the Jews. That word stabbed me like a dagger; ‘extermination’. I had heard it used time and time again in books and Nazi propaganda, but to hear it in this context and to be standing amidst the ground where it was executed was crippling. I could not stop crying throughout the entire tour. To be honest, I didn’t understand why. I know this is part of my history, and I know given my ancestry the odds are I have several distant relatives that worked and died in these camps. But I didn’t know anyone personally, I don’t even know his or her names, in my mind it was 70 years ago, how could it be affecting me now in such a great capacity? But it was. I could not control it. Something in my spirit was being tugged at and twisted. I didn’t fully understand it, but I couldn’t stop it.
Our tour continued through one of the barracks of Auschwitz I where we saw the beds, and living conditions. The walls were lined with photos of men and women, their names and their information. The number of names and faces was overwhelming, and yet it was only a small fraction of the victims, all of whom had been completely stripped of their dignity, identity and value by the Nazi regime. Who were all of these innocent people, what were their stories, are any of them distant relatives; does any of their blood flood through my veins today? These were the questions that wouldn’t escape my mind.
We continued into another barrack that displayed models of the gas chambers and crematoriums. On display was a small portion of the chemicals used on the Jewish people. We passed from that room into another that displayed a pile of sunglasses collected from the victims, a tremendous room full of shoes, whose shear size took you aback, (and yet it didn’t even begin to represent the amount of people imprisoned in the camp). Next came the display of luggage, the giant piles of shaving kits and hairbrushes, the dishware and utensils, all of which only reflected the twisted hope the Jewish people were encouraged to hold onto.
After that, came the room of hair. These are all photos I have seen before; I’ve seen the pile of hair, of shoes, of suitcases. These images filled pages of books I have sifted through over the years, it wasn’t anything I hadn’t seen before. And yet it was. The display easily stretched anywhere from 20 to 30 feet long and was filled with hair that the soldiers had ordered shaved from victims murdered in the gas chambers. It was sick and twisted on so many levels.
(Taken from the Museum’s website)
I entered the room and felt the air escape abruptly from my lungs. I was instantly drawn to a patch of hair in the front of the case. It was beautiful, bright and silky blonde. The pain overwhelmed me. If the Lord arranged my time decades earlier, that could have belonged to me, that could have belonged to a distant relative of mine, a young woman my age with all the drive and ambition in the world, or a little girl who didn’t even get the chance dream. It all became far too real. I slugged over to a distant pillar, cupped my hand over my mouth and began to weep. How could this happen? How could you despise, how could you loathe a group of people so much to want to ‘exterminate’ them like insects, to murder innocent, young, beautiful children? How do you even begin to justify that in the depths of your mind?
After that I couldn’t handle much more. The tour continued into the gas chambers at the edge of the camp. We saw the fake shower spigots that the soldiers installed in order to prolong the sick campaign of false hope. We saw the little vents in which the soldiers would drop the gas canisters. And we saw the cremation ovens where the bodies would be loaded until the proof of their existence was no more.
That concluded our tour of Auschwitz I, the work camp. We loaded a shuttle bus and headed 5km across the bridge to Auschwitz-Birkenau, the death camp.
As soon as we pulled up to the gate, my empathy and distress turned to hot anger.
This camp was tremendous in size, a few miles in length and eight football fields in depth. You pull up and it is just flat ground littered with brick barracks as far as the eye can see. It is instantly sickening the moment you lay eyes on it. This was a human factory constructed solely for the purpose of exterminating the Jewish race; it was expansive, thought out, neatly organized, and disgustingly efficient.
We toured Birkenau from the front to back. We saw the two large gas chambers of which only the remains lie (the Germans had bombed them just days before the camp was liberated). We saw the small pond behind the chambers where the soldiers discarded pounds of ashes. We walked through one of the women’s barracks that housed hundreds of women at a time, sleeping usually 4, sometimes up to 8 in a single bunk.
This camp was a well-oiled machine of mass murder. The depth to which the evil of man can and does go is repulsive. The German Soldiers built up such a hate for the Jewish people that they locked them in starvation cells, where they would literally be left to starve to a long, and painful death. They locked victims in suffocation cells; small dark cells, with a tiny, obstructed window, where victims would literally suffocate to death from a lack of clean air. Or they would lock them in standing cells, merely 9 square-feet in size, in which up to four prisoners would be held and forced to stand on their feet for up to 10 days at a time. The soldiers possessed such hatred, honed such a sense of evil, that they stood up a 9-year-old little girl against an execution wall and shot her square in the head. A nine-year-old, innocent little girl.
The depth of evil to which man can possess is uncanny. I know without a shadow of a doubt that my God is good, but this is such an undeniably fallen world, at times it gets impossible to watch. What the Nazi’s did to the Jewish people and to others was and is horrifying, but it’s not an evil that goes unmatched. A similar genocide occurred merely 35 years ago in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge regime, and similar genocide and persecution is happening today, right now, in the Middle East under ISIS. Children, innocent children, like that nine-year-old girl are being beheaded and crucified.
Our tour guide informed us, that in 1943 Birkenau prisoners were able to successfully transfer information out into the public about the treatment and conditions within the camp. The Washington Post then published an article about said conditions. In 1943, this article was published. 1943. Yet, the camp wasn’t liberated until 1945. How many more innocent lives were lost in that time?
Upon hearing that, the frustration that filled me in that moment was uncontainable. What were people doing?! How can you hear this, read about this, and do nothing?! But then I had to ask myself the humbling question. Horrific tragedies like this are happening today. TO-DAY. I not only read about them on paper, but because of technology I am able to see the horrifying images in pictures and video. They are confirmed before my eyes. There is no denying what is happening in other parts of the world, and yet what am I doing about it? What if my children or grandchildren walk through memorials like this in future decades, and ask me
–’Did you know this kind of stuff was going on?’
–’Yes.’
–’What did you do?…’
What’s my answer going to be?
