Today started with layering up for the cold wind that awaits us outside. Upon arriving to the camp of Auschwitz 1, it’s not like the photos that most of us were raised on seeing, the camp is covered with two barbed wire fences and destroyed roads, but the buildings are what really take you by surprise. It almost looks like a peaceful town from the outside with the tall bricked house-like buildings.
The empty streets give an eerie and almost haunting feeling to the groups. Most of the blocks have been remodeled on the inside to hold exhibits.
We begin to walk into block 17 and everything looks how you would expect, photos on the wall, some Nazi paperwork, but that changes when we walk upstairs and walk into a room. I turn and look at a friend whose jaw drops. I am now puzzled as to what could have caused this reaction. It’s not until I turn my head to see the human hair of hundreds of thousands of victims that I am overtaken by emotions. Personally, it is different to see someone’s suitcases or a pair of glasses, but someone’s hair is a part of that person. I became so overwhelmed that I didn’t want to continue, but I knew I would regret it if I didn’t go on.
After that emotional journey, we head for another complex, Auschwitz-Birkenau. One of the most recognizable extermination camps becomes unknown territory.
The size is a million times bigger than one expects, this camp that is designed to hold only 10,000 prisoners has been said to hold almost four-times that amount.
We begin to walk down the long train track to the ramp where the camp’s selection process took place almost 80 years ago. Then, we walk to the gas chambers 2 and 3—they are in ruins now because the S.S. Guards blew them up to try to hide evidence at the end of the war. These chambers could kill around 2,000 people at one time. As you walk up to the ruins, a feeling of remorse and sadness falls upon your body. The only pleasing site is the little stones placed on the ruins from other Jews as it is the custom to do on a grave.
We walk through the camp grounds, now we are the only people in the camp and the haunting feeling returns. We begin to read memoirs that each one of us picked from a prisoner of Birkenau, this put the camp into perspective. The sadness that takes over your body almost becomes too much to bear and I almost walked away again.
I pray that one day I can bring my future children to these historical sites. Before, I took the Holocaust for what I was taught from a book, that I know now was very one sided, but being here, walking into a gas chamber, experience just the slightest taste of what the Holocaust was like, opens my mind to the true events that took place. The ones the history books don’t tell you.
