seekingmygreaterperhaps

Genocide is real, and Auschwitz is a very large representation of this. I felt it deserved it’s own post, out of respect.

To get the bad out of the way first- I had a horrible tour guide. She wasn’t passionate about anything, and I think if you are a tour guide at Auschwitz, you should very easily make me cry. The Holocaust is SAD, and I was prepared to be torn up, and she let me down. Luckily, I took 8th grade English with Mrs. Watson, who was crazy about the Holocaust, so I was able to do that for myself. Psh. I’m my OWN tour guide.

The start of the tour was at the very iconic gates of Auschwitz. (This actually isn’t the death camp that every one thinks of, that’s Auschwitz-Birkenau, which is a little bit down the road.)

Here is where we saw the collections of all of the articles left behind. The piles and piles and piles of things. The suitcases. The combs. The eyeglasses. The artificial limbs that were stripped off of people before cremation. The baby clothes. The cookware, because people thought they would be starting a new life, and not shipped immediately off to the gas chamber. And most profoundly, the shoes. There was a huge walkway of just millions of pairs of shoes. Because people brought multiple pairs… because they didn’t know they were being sent there to die. You just kept walking and walking and the shoes never ended. That was hard for me, the whole day was.

Additionally, we went into one of the “temporary” gas chambers and saw the crematorium in the next room. One of the most impactful statements from our tour guide was, “the only exit was through the chimney.”

The train tracks at Auschwitz Birkenau. This is where cattle cars full of people would unload, and they would face a selection, where one man would decide if they lived or died.

Here is a bunk, where up to 8 people would sleep. What luxury.

Auchwitz is a HUGE place. It seemed to go on forever, which made it even worse. I took the same path as millions of people who didn’t have the bus waiting for them to take them home. I walked on the same gravel path. I stood in the bunks where people faced starvation. I saw the execution wall. It was real. And I felt sick afterwards.

My awesome tour guide left us saying that the Holocaust was done by regular people and that evil lurks inside all of us. Then said goodbye. As much as these acts were performed by regular people following orders, I know psychologically why they did these things, and it’s not because everyone is evil. I think the better message to have left us with would have been the one of hope. The only way people survived as long as they did was by holding on to hope- which is something we can all learn from.

Thank you, Auschwitz for showing me your darkest secrerts, but leaving me with a feeling that even in the bleakest of situations, hope can carry you through.