Auschwitz

Auschwitz is one of those places that when you learn about it, it's hard to believe it's real. Sure, you read the numbers. You see in your textbook that more than a million people were murdered here. Sure, you've read Night by Elie Wiesel for high school a few years ago. Sure, you imagine prisoners unknowingly being led like sheep to their deaths inside gas chambers.

But there's always a gap between imagination and experience. It's one thing to imagine standing at the infamous gate, “Arbeit Macht Frei” (meaning “work will set you free”), where prisoners passed through on the way to their death simply for their religion and genetic identity. And it's one incredibly miniscule step closer to the truth to actually stand there. But the gap between both of these actions and the actual experience is a gap I'm lucky to never have experienced, and visiting Auschwitz has only made me realize how big this gap actually is. How insane it is that standing in the same place thousands were murdered makes you feel helplessly farther from the truth than you ever felt reading about such a place thousands of miles away in an AP World History class 7 years ago.

When my tour group got off of the bus, we were greeted with the same snow, the same bitter cold that hundreds of thousands of Jews experienced when getting off their trains decades ago. The snow wasn't accompanied by wind and it was utterly silent around us except for the footsteps of other tour groups. Never have I heard a more profound silence in the air.

On so many blistering cold mornings in the early 1940s, trains from all over Nazi-occupied Europe full of both living and dead victims arrived in Auschwitz. Families that had endured a several days-long train ride without food or water, with people dying from exhaustion around them, held onto the faint sense of hope that they would at least be put in the same living block. But during “selection”, those who were deemed fit to work were separated from those “unfit to work”. Women and children were often separated from fathers and sent to the gas chambers upon arrival. I can't even imagine hearing the screams of families being torn apart where I stood at the train tracks.

There are two tragedies of Auschwitz that stuck out to me.

The first tragedy is the one we all know, the destruction. The destruction of lives, families, marriages, engagements, parents, children, brothers, sisters, love affairs, grandparents, friends, colleagues, classmates, traditions, culture, the chain goes on.

But the second tragedy was what made helplessly dissatisfied with my visit. And I don't think it had nothing to do with the tour guide, the museum, none of the organizers. It was simply the fact that it was impossible to cover the murder of more than a million lives in the span of a couple hours. No amount of time will ever feel enough, no amount of attention paid will do justice these lives lost. Every part of the tour - the living barracks, the house where the Nazi officers lived, the gas chambers, the crematorium - it all went by in an instant. Everything felt ridiculously rushed, and there was nothing I or the tour leader could do about it. There just simply isn't an easier way to grapple with so many deaths in one place.

I honestly think it's the duty of every human citizen to visit a place like this, because at the end of such a depressing visit there lies a hint of motivation at the end that sticks with you. There is no turning back the past, there is no reclaiming the lives, no reuniting the families separated. Seeing thousands of suitcases that belonged to children who, upon arrival, were sent to be suffocated to death by gas reminded me of something. All these kids had big dreams. They wanted to be artists, mathematicians, professors, doctors, soldiers when they got older. They saw their future selves as happy, thriving, and doing what they loved. If the victims had souls that talked they would be screaming at us to make the most of our lives. And so it's up to us, those who were born in more fortunate times then, to fulfill OUR dreams. We can't only be depressed by the past but use it as a point of inspiration... to be better. Being grateful for what we have and making the most out of it. Fighting the numerous injustices of our world today. And even more important, ensuring that something like this never happens again (tragically this is still happening in many parts of the world right now...). We just have no excuse to not be educated on our past. Never forget…