Auschwitz: A Pilgrimage

We visited Auschwitz as a pilgrimage on our way to Prague.

What an emotional stop.

Someone we love lost three family members there during WWII.

I didn’t think she would ever visit–the horror and loss is too much.

But we could go in her place and honor three individuals whose murder changed so much.

It behooves us to never forget what happened to so many innocent people–and to honor them.

Auschwitz

I’ve read countless stories about the Holocaust.

My husband, daughter and I have visited Dachau Concentration Camp.

We knew what we would see–we had visited Schindler’s Factory the day before.

All the same, walking through that gate unhinged me.

I began to sob–and continued through most of the following two hours.

Familiar horrors

Many have seen the photos, but to stand before a glass panel and view the real thing horrified.

Look at that pile of luggage.

People packed their suitcases with their most precious possessions.

They would have tucked heirlooms among their clothing and carried them to the train station.

Once arrived at Auschwitz on the special train, prisoners had their luggage and little else.

The Nazi guard immediately ordered the suitcases seized and they ended up in a pile like this one.

Notice how people carefully wrote their names on their luggage so they would not be separated from their possessions.

I gasped when I recognized the last name of another friend.

And cried harder.

Glasses

Each pair of glasses signified someone’s ability to see.

A pile of them gave a sample of how many people wanted to see.

Each pair perched on someone’s nose.

Perhaps it was a mercy they lost their glasses first thing.

(Did you know when the Khmer Rouge invaded Cambodia, the first thing the army did was shoot anyone who wore glasses?

(The theory was if you wore glasses you could read. If you could read, you could think. If you could think, you could lead and thus would be a threat to the regime.)

Physical aids

The Nazis, of course, were eugenists.

They believed in physical perfection.

The old affirmed and handicapped people went to the gas chambers upon arrival.

What on earth, did the authorities plan to do with what remained?

And the shoes

The last items stripped away probably were shoes.

The stack filled a large compartment–the leather now black with age and dust.

But then I saw one classic open-toed pump and pondered the woman who put it on that last day of her life.

One of the people we honored was a young woman. I could imagine her wearing such pumps.

It was too much to think of the decision she made to return to her homeland from a safe place in England.

Over and over again as I stalked through the brick barracks, I whispered her name followed by one word: “why?”

Emotional overload

I pushed through crowds of school children listening to a guide, trying to see around them and through my tears.

So shaken, I couldn’t say a word beyond “scusa,” which is Italian for “excuse me.”

(Why Italian? My native language escaped me in the horror).

I carried a small bouquet of lily of the valley I purchased the day before in Krakow’s market square.

Camp authorities allowed me to leave the bouquet in one place at the camp: the execution wall

I didn’t think I could cry anymore by the time I got there.

Shaking, cold to the bone with tears dripping down my face, I left them amid lit candles. “I’m so sorry.”

My husband caught me as I turned away, totally lost and falling apart.

At the end of the corridor sat a guard-house: watching for death.

Honoring the Auschwitz dead

The second row of brick bunkers houses national memorials to the dead.

We visited only the Hungarian memorial–the people we honored were picked up in Budapest.

Rick Steves’ Eastern Europe warned that memorial haunts–stark black and white photos and signs tell the story of the Hungarian Jews and enemies of the Nazi state.

It’s eerie because the muffled sound of a beating heart pervades the room.

The whole experience felt poignant, surreal, horrifying, and incredibly sad.

We skirted the gas chamber area and walked out the gates, finished in more ways than I could have imagined.

The rolling farmlands outside the barbed wire gates are beautiful in the spring.

But nothing can take away the horror of man’s inhumanity to man at Auschwitz.

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Inhumanity to millions on display at Auschwitz. Click to Tweet