i can't say much of anything about this experience that doesn't seem trite. my generation is so far removed from what happened during the war, protected by overlapping layers of time, distance, culture... it's hardly reality for me, what happened so long ago. for that matter, those horrors that may be happening now, but so far away, aren't a part of my reality either. i am not and was not there. i have no idea. it is difficult to even imagine it. and it's so easy to stay within the boundaries of my comfortable life.
i will say this, walking into a room where the braided tresses of more than 40,000 women are piled in a mountainous heap was an experience that almost made me puke. literally. seeing a piles of suitcases, combs, shoes, kettles, clothing was gut-wrenching. it was an appropriately dark, bitterly cold, windy day. uncomfortable in every sense.
i was finally brought to tears when i saw a pile of toothbrushes, the mundane and intimate little toothbrush. these people were told they were being resettled, so of course they would bring along a toothbrush. it is something i never leave home without. i guess that was my moment. the moment when, for me, the masses who were exterminated became individuals who were murdered.
i think they've kept those objects in the museum to connect the unfathomable number - 1,300,000 brutally murdered people - to the individual. for some people it is the name and birth date written on a suitcase. for others it is a face from a photograph or a pair of children's shoes. for others it is the forest of chimneys or the reconstruction of the crematorium. for me it was those toothbrushes. an item of the everyday that symbolizes an ending of someone's everyday.
historians keep telling the stories of Auschwitz, hoping that humanity will learn from its own horrors in efforts to help prevent a repeat of them. i am glad i saw what i saw, even though it was uncomfortable and disturbing.
we viewed this trip as a historical pilgrimage. a voyage from the comforts of our day to day. to see history. to feel sad. to wonder about the nature of our own kind. someone in a pub in Krakow said, "But, it's Christmas! How can you stand seeing that kind of thing during the holidays?" well, we hope to have many more christmases and many more holiday parties and many more presents and many more nights spent with friends and family in our future, but when an opportunity to do something important presents itself, it seems to us like a good idea to take it, no matter what time of year it is.
and it was.
facts about Auschwitz-Auschwitz II (Birkenau)
- more people were exterminated in the gas chambers at Auschwitz II (Birkenau) (estimate: 1.2 - 1.5 million) than were killed in action during the war from the U.S. and England combined (800,000)
- the Auschwitz camp, like all concentration camps, started as prisons for political "enemies of the state" and, other than military executions, it was not a killing camp at first.
- the series of events, the evolution in philosophy, that took place to slowly dehumanize, and finally mass murder, took place over many months/years and with the input of the intellectual, political, and military elite of German society. these were often not "crazy" people, but very intelligent people making rational decisions based on their ideals of right and wrong.
- at the peak of the "final solution," those Jews who weren't immediately killed on their day of arrival at Birkenau (just 20-30 percent) were forced to work hard labor with little clothing, 400 calories of poor food, and little heat or fresh water. they usually died within four months.
and my friend emily sent me this, who doesn't love sportscenter (and a gigantic fuzzy duck)?