Auschwitz

Poland | Maidanek | Chelmno | Jedwabne | Treblinka | Auschwitz

Everyone has a breaking point. It is the point at which you simply feel you cannot take anymore. You cannot cry more, you cannot feel anger and you don't want to feel sadness any more. You feel that your heart hurts, and you don't want to feel that either. I watched those who accompanied me on the trip to Poland. Each had their breaking point, some had more than one.

I didn't break in Chelmno beside the grave of a little boy, though I thought I would. There I felt anger. Anger at the Germans who had murdered this little baby, only three days old. Fury at a world who would allow this to happen and the pain of a woman, just three days after giving birth, who was taken with her infant and killed (see Story of the Chelmno Baby).  

I didn't break in Maidanek, by the piles and piles of shoes. More than 800,000 shoes. Each pair represented a life, a story, a person (see Story of a Shoe).

There were many places that I didn't break. I observed, I took pictures, I was deeply saddened, and committed to seeing each place. Each was a learning experience, this was why I cam to Poland. To see, to feel. But I didn't break right away. It took days to build up to the point that I felt I couldn't stand being there for even another moment, time to understand that the evil that remained was stronger than I was, stronger than I could ever be. In Israel, the evil cannot defeat us, but in Poland, the evil is all that remains for a Jew. Poland is a beautiful land...but not for the Jews. The Jews are all dead (except a few...who don't understand why they remain, who welcome us and smile a sad, confused smile...and then watch us go). There were places I cried, places I felt a deep anger and a deeper sense of hatred. Then they took us to Birkenau, to Auschwitz.

I broke in Auschwitz. It was so vast, so evil. The sun was shining beautifully, tourists from South Korea came and asked some of the Israeli girls (carrying the Israeli flag) to pose with them. Evil can be ignored when you only see the buildings, the broken rails, the decaying buildings. What harm could have been done in such a place? Fields of green grass, not a cloud in the sky. Some of the girls smiled into the camera and I was ashamed for them. It wasn't my place to tell them, and yet I was one of only a few mothers on the trip, so quietly, in Hebrew, I asked them to remember where they were. They understood right away. This was Auschwitz. This was a place of ugliness, of death, of evil. You have to look past the green grass and the tall trees. Back to a time when it wasn't green, when it was so cold, explained one survivor, that the water from the brief shower the Nazis permitted them to take in the morning, froze on their bodies when they were forced to run back to their barracks without clothes. We saw the communal toilets...just a long slab of cement with holes in it...all meant to degrade, to dehumanize, to humiliate. I almost broke there, but not quite.

There was no grass growing in 1944, explained the survivor that came with us. The inmates of the concentration camp, those who were not murdered immediately, would eat the grass. There was so little to eat, and so the land was cold and barren and empty, not like what we were seeing at all. The crematoria have been destroyed. They are only rubble now. You can only imagine that the crumbled cement and twisted metal once served the Germans well.

I didn't want to bring soil from Israel to place at Auschwitz. It is a custom that some follow - to take holy soil and place it on the graves of Jews buried outsided of our land. The soil serves as a marker - here lies a part of our people. But I couldn't bring myself to place our soil in that land, and so I brought with me a picture of the Western Wall. It was taken during my son's bar mitzvah and I thought of it as a way to show my son's great grandparents, great aunts and uncles, that their descendent had found his way home.

In the twisted metal of the destroyed crematorium, under a small overhang that I hoped would protect the picture from the rain, I placed the picture of the Western Wall (the Kotel). I stepped back and saw the picture of the Kotel, the last remnant of the holiest site in Judaism, where we'd celebrated my son's bar mitzvah and I thought of my mother-in-law, who'd been put in a gas chamber, and then taken out because the Nazis had needed more women for a work detail. I thought of my grandfather, who'd lost his mother and sisters here, where I was standing. I thought of my husband, who had never known the special love of a grandparent, because Hitler had a plan. It was very hard to leave the picture there, knowing that the Poles would quickly clean it away.

I looked at the rubble of the crematorium, all that is left of the nightmare and there, in the place that had known such horrors, I couldn't hold back the tears. I wanted to go home, away from this place.

For a moment, I thought of retrieving the picture, but I wanted them to have it. It was one of several places that I felt was no longer Poland. I'd come to holy ground, blessed by the blood of so many. May they long be remembered, and may the names of those who put them there be erased from all time...not the memory of what they did, but all that they wished to accomplish, all that they wanted, all that they planned.

Some pictures of Auschwitz...

	Pictures found among the belongings of Hitler's victims. Hundreds and hundreds. Thousands and thousands. A woman proudly showing off her newborn baby. A grandmother smiling beside her grandchildren. Generations captured in pictures and lost in time. This is only one wall of many.
Rows and rows of prayer shawls hang in a "collection" room at Auschwitz...just part of the loot taken from the Jewish refugees who were herded through to Auschwitz and then murdered. There are rooms for suitcases, eyeglasses, long mountains of hair, artificial limbs...it breaks the heart.
	On the remains of one of the crematoria, a survivor prays for the memory of seven members of his family. Each a world in himself. A mother, a father, a brother. A young cousin, uncles and aunts. Grandparents. In the end, four young orphans survived along...