This past weekend I visited 2 of the 3 Auschwitz Concentration/Death Camps, Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II - Birkenau.
Even “Surreal” is a word that can’t adequately describe what it was like to step foot on the same path that a countless number of men and women - sons, and daughters - walked along, under the guise of resettlement, to an almost inevitable death.
Visiting Auschwitz II, I walked through the infamous gate, down the road, and into one of the blocks where those imprisoned slept. I saw the standing cells in the basement where prisoners being punished in such a manner would be forced to sleep, standing all night long - four people standing in a cell measuring only one square meter. I saw the mound of shoes and the literal thousands of pounds of hair, all signs of human life, representing only a small fraction of those were were murdered, whose life stories met a gruesome and too-often-forgotten end. I looked at the suitcases with family names and addresses written across the sides. I saw the pictures, the wall of faces, faces of those men and women who were at the camp in its earlier days, those whose names and dates of death are known, those whom society has not yet entirely forgotten. There are many more whose stories are untold, who did not have their photographs taken, who were not even recorded amongst those in the camp.
Try to imagine that, the shear number of those entering the gates of Auschwitz became so immeasurably large that the Nazis stopped keeping accurate records of all those whom they were systematically murdering. Aside from being a cumbersome task, they didn’t care to keep an accurate count as the war was nearing an end because they were simply trying to put an end to as many human lives as they could, as fast as they could do so. Aware of their impending demise, the Nazis also didn’t want the world to see the reality inside the Camps, they didn’t want us to be aware of how many civilians they murdered or of the systematic manner in which they murdered them. Before the Camps were liberated, they attempted to cover their tracks by destroying buildings and hiding whatever they could. While there’s still much to see, there’s also a great deal we’ll never know- such as how many people perished under the rule of Hitler’s Nazi Germany.
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