The Final Solution of the Jewish Question

The trees are weeping in the rain, cold and barren against the freezing weather. How surreal to take a voluntary trip to a place that over 1.1 million were forced to. I feel tired and fatigued from a persistent cold, but cannot fathom what it must of felt like to take this trip 70 years ago. The closer we get to Auschwitz the more somber I become, the more quiet. A time to reflect and honor history.

It’s astounding to think of what we are capable of doing to each other. We are capable of infinite love and inescapable cruelty, of malicious indifference and overwhelming kindness.

There’s a heaviness in the air.

In five years the Nazis were able to kill over 1.1 million people in Auschwitz alone. This number is staggering to me. I knew the tour would be emotionally draining but the reality is more than that. The reality is I am a young American, extremely blessed with the opportunity to see the world and learn as much as possible. I don’t know bigotry, I don’t know starvation, I don’t know torture and hypothermia and pain. I go to Auschwitz by choice, not by force 70 years earlier.

The tour is a blur of reaction and detail. A room full of hair, with traces of Zyklon B in it. After gassing their victims, the Nazis would sell their hair to factories where they would make cloth and tapestries. The pile of hair is slowly disintegrating but still fills an entire room. To this day, tapestries from the era exist, with Zyklon B traces still in it.

There are other rooms filled to the brim with luggage, shoes, and dolls. The Nazis systematically collected anything of value down to gold fillings and miscellaneous jewelry.

If you were a child in the camps, you were either forced to work or sent to the medical unit for experiments. Out of over 700 children born in Auschwitz, only around 200 survived the experience. The pictures accompanying this part of the tour are images that I am not soon to forget.

Walking through the complex I am wearing multiple layers and still freezing. I walk through the mud and try to imagine walking through the same grounds with minimal clothing and an empty belly.

Like many genocides, the crimes were documented relentlessly. Auschwitz is the only concentration camp to tattoo it’s victims. They started with photos originally, but couldn’t keep up with the amount of people getting shipped in. The death factory, they called it. Out of every new train they would only choose 25% to work in the camps. Only the healthy and fit weren’t immediately taken to the gas chambers. Those lucky enough to work usually only lasted a few months.

What would you prefer?

While Auschwitz is the more well-known concentration camp, Birkenau is located adjacent to Auschwitz and is much larger. They called Auschwitz paradise compared to the conditions of Birkenau. Bunks were shared with 10 people and infectious diseases were extremely common. By this point in the tour, roughly 3 hours in exploring the area, I am overwhelmed with emotion. My friend and I have barely spoken and are lost in trying to process the magnitude of history.

As we end the tour at one of the four gas chambers, I remember the photos displayed in the begining of the tour. Hundreds of photos of prisoners. I see no difference between them and me. I can’t pick out the Jews from the prisoners of war or the gypsies. All I see are humans, all I see are people exactly like you and me. We are not divided in our differences but are united in our humanity.

The least I can do, as a human being, is to honor the past in the hopes that it never happens again.

Work makes you free