We are the last generation who can hear from these survivors directly. Do not take that lightly. Do not waste that opportunity. Do not forget your freedom isn’t infinitely guarenteed. And do not, do not, let it happen again.
Really truly, watch the video, reblog it. Teaching about the holocaust is so necessary for our generation before it slips under the rug and people forget about it.
I visited Poland the summer I turned 21 with a group from school. Our entire trip up until that point at been a raccous, drunken, jubilant journey from one country to the next with a few days of class in between. The laughter just flowed wherever we went and I’m hard pressed to remember when we weren’t having a wonderful time.
Until we went to Auschwitz.
I can’t put into words the physical pall that fell over us. For me, it was pulling up to a site that felt larger than a stadium, with a vast field that once corralled people facing extermination. Our tour guide, a Polish man seemingly inured to the whole thing, was blathering the whole time and I can’t remember a word of what was said.
Walking under the sign “Arbeit macht frei” changed my life. Going through buildings that displayed an endless number of stolen pieces of property that equated stolen lives was a gut-wrenching and surreal experience — shoes, reading glasses, suitcases — all carelessly piled up behind glass barriers. They filled rooms.
Walking into the open yard, imagining the thousands of men and women and children and that had stepped in the same place haunted me. The pictures of emaciated faces and hollow eyes have never left me. The idea that human beings did this to other human beings altered the fabric of my reality. Some group of people built buildings in an idyllic countryside with the sole purpose of torturing, starving, experimenting on, and killing another group of people.
Walking around the perimeter of the structure, seeing how large it was designed to be, and wondering how small and hopeless it must have felt to the people inside made my mind conjur up how this atrocity seamlessly wove its way into the narrative of other culture and race based atrocities throughout time. We read history books and think such acts are in the past, when we were less “civilized,” but to see tangible proof is another thing entirely.
I had to ask myself then, “How was this allowed to happen? What allowed people on the outside to watch as train cars full of people were shipped toward their ultimate doom?” I never came up with any logical conclusions. Only illogical ones.
I will never, not as long as I live, forget walking around that place — 60 years after the fact, unaffected literally, but wholly affected emotionally and spiritually — knowing it was a fraction of a fraction of a moment for me, that I could never come remotely close to understanding any of it, and it was still painful to contemplate . And to think that people still alive had experienced in totality. How they could walk around and still function escaped me. How they could love and laugh and live counfounded me. It still does. I don’t ever want to forget or lose the feelings and thoughts and total full-body sorrow that washed through me.
When we start forgetting things like this? When they leave our collective memories? That’s when it begins to unravel more and more. That’s when men and women and children with hopes and dreams not unlike our own end up in cages at the border — dying from curable ailments, sitting in soiled diapers, menstruating without hygiene products — while we go about our daily lives. That’s how it starts. Indifference.
Indifference will literally be the end of all that is good and wonderful and bright about our world. Maybe today it’s “them” that’s suffering. Tomorrow it could be “us.” So we have remain vigilant and demand from our leaders and ourselves that it’s not them and it’s not us — it’s no one.
Not them and not us. Truly. Absolutely.
We all deserve peace and happiness and life.
