03-20-10
Bleak.
That is the word that best describes the mood the
weather pressed upon me as I exited the bus. The frigid air felt as though it
blew right through my body, freezing each cell, turning my limbs to ice. The
snow, which pelted my face, attached itself to the patches of white already on
the ground, gradually expanding until it connected the whole world in hues of
white and grey. Clumps of brown, dead grass peeked through the snow, a reminder
of the death that had made this place famous. The tears that formed in my eyes
solidified as they leaked down my frozen cheeks. Somehow I felt that if it had
been a bright, sunshine-filled day, green grass below my feet and blue sky
above me, the truth of this world I had found myself in would have been lost to
me. The pain that emanated in this place, the pain that seemed so recent,
though it happened decades ago, would have just slipped by me unnoticed had it
not been an icy winter day. It would have been just another historical place,
another fact in my mind placed there by various history teachers over the
years. Instead, my emotional intuition had been activated and the place became
more than the legend I had considered it before: real, but distant like a
story. It was more than just words and statistics, but it was real, an
undeniable atrocity, one of the grossest eras in all human history.
Here I was in Poland. March, 2010. Auschwitz. Decades
after World War II, the lives of the innocent, brutally subjected to Hell on
earth, still cried out. Their plight became real to me in the most minimal
sense, just by the effects the weather had on my flesh. The stage had been set,
the mood achieved, and here I stood, bundled in layers of fabric, a luxury
denied the victims of the Auschwitz camps.
I walked
through camp, through the gate, past dozens of barracks, each of which held
about a thousand people, cramped together, in beds that resembled cattle
stalls. Yet these were people considered worth less than cattle. I walked
through buildings that were storehouses the uncountable amount of belongings
which prisoners had brought with them. Hair brushes. Shaving utensils. Bowls.
Dolls. Shoes. Human hair. I had already been fighting sickness, but at the sight
of the human hair, which was used to make blankets for soldiers, it was all I
could do to stay on my feet. All the items were piled high, each a mountainous
category, only a portion of total confiscated during the days of the camps.
Among the numerous suitcases, I saw a name I recognized. Meyer.
The knot in my stomach
became more tangled as I thought about how I had had family on both sides of
the war. I had had family who had fought to support the man who had deemed
these innocent people to be worth less than livestock, unworthy to live. These people
who had lives like we do, had jobs, families, struggles, talents. Felt
happiness, sadness, fear, love, like we do. But they were thrown into the fiery
furnace and they were consumed.
Those deemed
unfit for physical work were sent immediately to the gas chambers. Later, other
prisoners would carry their corpses to the crematoriums which produced ash,
layering the ground in a constant snow, not composed of frozen water molecules.
Others were shot in front of cement slabs. Others died in starvation cells.
Others died from lack of nutrients or of the cold or of over work or of having
lost the desire to live.
What made them unworthy to live in the eyes of
Nazi-Germany, I cannot understand. My anger at the evil the human race is
capable of, my sadness of the beautiful lives destroyed, the hope that few
found…all these combine in me to create a stoicism. I am overwhelmed with
emotion, but which I cannot tell. All I can think of is my guilt at standing
here, making a spectacle of the pain which engulfed millions.
And yet, in that pain of the few that survived the
camps, some had a joy that overcame all the darkness they had been through. If
their joy can survive hell like that, the pain that I am engulfed in is also
surmountable. I feel guilty when I think about how my own pain has consumed me,
when I went through nothing compared to these people. How could anyone do
something as gross as this to any living-being. How could any human being
believe that another is so different from them that they are not worthy of even
the most simple things? What is it that qualifies humans worthy or unworthy of
life?
In my anger I would say that those who had decided who
was unworthy of life were the only ones worthy of the sentence appointed to
others. But thankfully, I am not the one who makes the decision of who is
worthy of life and who is worthy of living hell.
