Standing Among the Ashes of the Dead

Walking onto the property, you'd never know that over a million men, women, and children died here.  Instead, you would see the coffee shop, the children running around and laughing, the parents and teachers trying to corral the school groups together, the eager tourists looking forward to their chance to walk onto the hallowed grounds - and maybe buy a souvenir postcard and take a cute selfie in the process.

Taking your first footsteps onto the grounds, you'd still never recognize it as the place where men and women were brutally beaten and systematically murdered. Everything is lush and green - trees line the walkways, grass grows in the areas between the buildings, and if you didn't know what had happened there, you might think that you had just wandered into a small town built of bricks.

But then you see the sign.

And you walk under the sign that tells you that "Work will set you free."

And from that point on, your visit will never be the same.

Because, no matter how often you try to justify it in your mind - no matter how many times you try to look at your surroundings and say that they're too beautiful for so many horrible things to have occurred there - you cannot shake the sense of doom and evil lurking around every corner.

You cannot look out of the windows of the brick buildings without seeing a watchtower and feeling a trapped sensation.

You cannot look at the numbers printed on the walls without feeling a sickening tightening in your gut.

You cannot walk down the tree-lined avenues without wondering why.

You cannot step into the rooms filled with hair without thinking about the people that it all once belonged to.

You cannot walk down the corridor of shoes without smelling the stench of slowly rotting leather and wanting to vomit - and then, when you reach the window at the end, before you turn back, you are filled with despair as your gaze is met by the watchtower again.

The baby toys and infant clothing make you want to cry.

You want to scream at the tourists taking pictures of the sight where men and women were first murdered with Cyclone B that this is a place where people died, and can you not document your vacation for just one minute, please, and respect the dead.

You pass the cell where Maximilian Kolbe died, and cross yourself, and say a prayer, because you're starting to get claustrophobic in this prison and want to get out as soon as you can.

You see the wall where men and women were executed, turned into a memorial with flowers, and wonder why people can't just treat the whole place as a memorial, instead of only a single spot.

And then, just when you think you're about to be free, you walk into the gas chamber.

And now you really want to scream, because everyone around you is taking photos of the walls, the floor, the ceiling. And you can't bear to be in there, standing among the ashes of the dead (not literal ashes, because every surface has long since been wiped clean) with people who cannot fully grasp the enormity of what they're witnessing. The crematorium is a distant image for you because you just walk straight past it to get outside - the stench of death is too strong inside.

And again, you think, you're free - but you're not.

You take a fifteen minute drive to another place, just like it.

Except this one looks like it was meant to kill.

All of the structures are wood. And cattle cars and railway tracks still line the middle, dividing everything.

Half of the structures are just chimneys, because they were burned.

The ones that still stand are horrible to see.

Everyone has a need to see inside. But you can't. You've seen enough.

Enough for a lifetime.

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I wasn't completely sure how I could put my experience into words, so I chose to use the second person.

The experience at Auschwitz and Auschwitz II - Birkenau is not something that I ever thought I would have, nor is it something that I ever want to experience again.

Standing on the site where so many died, I never thought I would experience so much ignorance from those around me about what they were witnessing. I heard one person ask why the Jews didn't know that they were going to prison and death camps, and why more of them didn't try to escape. I saw so many people taking selfies outside the walls, and running around laughing as if they didn't know what had happened there 70 years before. I also saw people taking photographs of the prison cells where the first tests of Cyclone B were done.

But I also saw some people who were as affected as I was. Classmates who wrote incredibly moving stories on their social media to share with their families back home once we returned, and who were incredibly solemn throughout the entire trip (and for most of the rest of the day after). The fact that other people my age realized what was going on at that site, seeing the need for the remembrance, and passed on the word to others makes me incredibly - not happy, but sort of proud of my generation.

I don't think I can ever go back to Auschwitz. The sensory overload was too great, the images too powerful, for me to undertake a return journey. I barely made it out of the first camp in one piece - adding the second camp atop that was almost too much.

The most important thing, I think, that I can bring from this experience, is to never forget the human aspect of history.

Never forget that men and women died.

It's not just the dates, the major figures, and the places on the exams - although all of those are important, too.

Remember that things like the Holocaust happened. Remember the victims.

Don't let them be forgotten.