An Overdue Entry

This Journal entry is a bit overdue, but I recently noticed, I never got around to writing about my visit to Auschwitz. That was a day trip I did from Krakow, back in Poland, it seems like so long ago now. You might ask, “Why spend vacation time at a death camp?” I didn't want to go at first. I can hardly sit through holocaust movies and certainly not without going to sleep sobbing and distraught. I'm an emotional girl. The more I thought about it, however, the more it made since. Admission to the camp is free, it's not a money grubbing tourist trap that benefits from peoples’ suffering. Auschwitz is actually a museum. Survivors and family of survivors made it into a museum because they wanted people to go there and understand what they went through. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed disrespectful not to go.

So I did. I don't have any pictures to share; I didn't think it was appropriate to take my camera. In fact, it really got on my nerves to see other tourist taking pictures of themselves in front of the gas chambers or barbed wire fences, really not a get in the photo type of place.

You all know what it looks like anyway. If you haven't seen pictures in history books you've seen it in movies, Shindler’s List and The Pianist and so on. I won't go into detail about the displays, everyone knows what went on there, the endless mountains of belongings, rooms full of human hair, and hall after hall plastered floor to ceiling with mug shots of the prisoners. Before the Nazis realized the efficiency of tattooing everyone they took photos. These pictures are now on display along with the prisoner’s name, country of origin, arrival date in the camp, and death date. From the dates I saw I'd say those who weren't killed upon arrival lasted an average of three months.

I don't know if this is a selfish way to look at things, but I found myself putting my family and me in the situation. I imagined I was born in 1930. We're a happy Catholic family living in Poland. We're invaded in 1939, I'm in 4th grade, Jays in 5th, Maddy is a 2nd grader. We don't flee the country because we're a family with three small kids, it would have been very difficult. I think being Catholic, not Jewish, we could have held out a few years but eventually would have been brought to Auschwitz to be exterminated, I imagined in about 1942. Upon arrival to the camp we’d go through the separation process. Mom and Dad, both healthy and in their mid forties, would have been kept alive and used for slave labor. Maddy, only 10 might have been kept alive temporarily to be used for medical experiments. If she was very, very lucky her blond hair and blue eyes might have won her a place in a specialized Germinization school where she'd be brain washed and brought up with a good German family. (This is possible but highly unlikely.) Jay and I would have been killed upon arrival. This is a best-case scenario. Some days trains full of people would come in and the SS men couldn't be bothered to have a separation that day. Everyone would be shaved, stripped and gassed within hours of arriving to the camp. Personally, I think if I hadn't been gassed immediately I’d have tried to commit suicide as fast as possible. Why live through Hell while Salvation is waiting?

My other thought was, “What would the world be like if the Nazis had won the war?” There would be no Jews left, no one would know what Judaism was, and today no one would know about any of the killing and camps. There would be statues and monuments of Hitler everywhere and we would all be speaking German.

What bothered me the most about the camp wasn't the heaps of baby clothes or the room full of wheelchairs and prosthetic limbs, but the fact that genocide is still very real in today’s world. With museums like Auschwitz that people crowd to day in and day out year round, how can things like this still go on in so many poor places of the world. Maybe it's been made public because the U.S. eventually got involved and the U.S. likes to make its actions public. Hard to say. I wish there was something I could do to ensure it would never happen, but clearly it would take more then one person. Maybe big protests to say, “HEY U.N.!! GET WITH IT!!”

My visit to Auschwitz was a very moving, very sad day.