Auschwitz & Birkenau

4/18/12 — March of the Living

I keep asking everyone if they're okay. 

An uneasy glance is exchanged with an unspoken idea: I don't know. 

The realities of the Holocaust seem unreal as we pass piles of cut hair, shoes, and suitcases. We walk in disbelief, not wanting to accept the past. Today, we toured Auschwitz. We walked Birkenau. With the horrors surrounding these areas, with the ruins of death still remaining, we find everything pretty overwhelming. In my mind, the sunny weather made is worse. How can these places be lit up by sunlight after such events? 

Yet, my mind changed throughout the day. Two amazing survivors talked to my group. The first we met in front of a picture of women and children, dressed in uniforms, behind the barbed-wire fences. With one powerful motion, the woman points to a small child wrapped around the shoulders of a middle-aged woman and says: "That's me." We were all shocked as she tells her story. As most of us tear up, thinking about her life, about all the pain she went through, she tells us: "Don't be sad. I'm alive, aren't I?" 

A few hours later, Trudy tells us her story. She witnessed the deaths of many close people. She learned to blend in, survived on little bread and water. Her story came to and end as tears ran down her face, over joyed about the room filled with teens who are passionate about learning of the Holocaust.

Gradually, an idea radiated throughout the day:

We often only see the bad and forget the good. But the survivors don't want that; 

they want us never to experience a dark day in our lives.

-David Kaminsky

Author's Note

ignore grammar problems... this was written with tears running down my face in a journal. The misplaced commas usually act as pauses when I write from the heart.

Reviews

[Mir]

Wow. This was beautiful. Really. Wow. The holocaust was such a terrible event. Have you ever read "Night", by Elie Weisel? (Spelling of his name is questionable.) I read it, and it inspired a poem about the holocaust. But it is nowhere as good as this peice of work! Amazing, amazing job! :)