If I accidentally stumbled upon the former Auschwitz concentration camp, I might as well assumed that the beautiful red brick buildings were a part of a college campus. However, touring the inside of some of these buildings which have been turned into museums definitely helped to bring me closer to the reality of the dismal place.
I think if there was one word to sum up my experience of Auschwitz it would be numbness. Words cannot adequately describe my feelings that day -first it was the utter lack of emotion I felt or rather didn't feel upon first entering the camp and then I became completely enraptured by the sudden onslaught of suffocating guilt for my lack of emotion and then all this was followed by a confusing mass of jumbled thoughts that began flying through my brain at a hundred miles an hour. If only the tour guide would stop talking and give me a solitary moment to sit on the floor of the gas chamber to gather my thoughts, I thought to myself. It was so difficult for me to convince myself of the atrocity that happened exactly where I was standing. That hundreds of Jews, Gypsies, and other minorities laid cold, naked, starving, beaten, and ill in that tiny room.
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| execution courtyard |
As I walked across the gas chamber room I had two powerfully competing thoughts. In order to more fully emphatically experience Auschwitz, I had a desperate yearning to feel a small share of the physical, mental, spiritual, and emotional anguish the Holocaust victims endured. The second thought was a very sobering one as I began to realize how I am not all that dissimilar from that Nazi who flipped the switched in that very gas chamber I was standing in. How very humbling and terrifying it is to think that I am no better than Hitler. While all sins are not equal in severity, they are all equal in penalty.
The torture and humiliation that I pitied the Jews for having to endure is what I deserve to endure. That gas chamber where I was filled with righteous anger is where I belong -it's where we all belong. Touring the former Auschwitz camp was more than just a historical learning moment for me.
For a while I had a very difficult time convincing myself that the Holocaust actually happened. The 40,000 pairs of shoes or the two tons of hair I saw just didn't seem real. Thinking back over this experience, it is very sobering to think about how similar atrocities -maybe not to the same degree or level -are happening all around us all the time. Oftentimes we just choose to ignore them. I let Auschwitz numb me initially but I pray I will never grow numb to the injustice that surrounds me every day.
