Visit to Auschwitz and Birkenau

Sunday, July 27, 2008
Today, we toured Auschwitz and Birkenau. I am overwhelmed and extremely saddened by the experience. I remember my history lessons probably about as well as anyone else. I know that a terrible thing happened in my parents’ time—they were children at the time of World War II. So, they may have heard about concentration camps. I know I read about them. But, hearing about something and reading about that thing, as I did, are totally different from actually walking around on the ground where that thing took place. Elizabeth went through a period several years ago when she read books about World War II and the Holocaust. Her response to the tour was exactly that: “You can read about things but they are more real when you go to the place where they happened.”

For me, the experience was a combination of things. I was undone by the room with the display of human hair. That room affected me more than many of the other rooms such as the room of suitcases (names printed on the side so the owner could retrieve it later), the room filled with piles of shoes, the room filled with eyeglasses, and the room filled with brushes (hair brushes, shoe brushes, tooth brushes). The hair was a physical part of the people who were so brutally murdered. It is all that is left. I was horrified to learn that the Nazis used the hair, shaved from the corpses before cremation, in making fabric that was then used to make overcoats for soldiers. There were many, many other difficult things to see but seeing that hair was hard. How many soldiers unwittingly wore coats that included hair from those who were gassed at Auschwitz and Berkenau? I was also overcome by a different emotion when we were in the courtyard where executions by shooting were performed. The wall, against which the doomed prisoners stood or knelt, had a multitude of stones carefully placed in every opening large enough to hold a stone. The stones are remembrances from people who have visited this place. I looked it up after we returned home and it is part of a Jewish custom that when someone visits a grave, they leave a stone which shows that someone remembers and came to that place.
The other thing that made a big impression on me was the totally methodical, highly planned and organized way the camps were designed and run. The most dramatic presentation of that fact was the map of Europe showing how centrally located Auschwitz/Berkenau was. For the most part, as I understand it, the rail lines were already in place. That made it easier to transport the prisoners. It was efficient.

As a young person, when I started learning about World War II, concentration camps, death camps, and the Holocaust, I wondered how people could do those things to other people. But the answer is in the question. If you don’t consider the others to be people, you can excuse your own behavior. I pray the lessons of Auschwitz/Berkenau and all the other camps have been learned, I fear they have not.