Tears for Auschwitz and Birkenau

I sat on the bus listening to Zdeněk coldly explain how the Nazis had created Auschwitz II (Birkenau) as a more efficient means of exterminating Jews. We would visit Auschwitz I followed by Birkenau, which was not far away.

I exited the bus and followed Zdeněk through the tourist entrance and to the left. The paths were walled with barbed wire, and gloomy watchtowers guarded the camp’s borders. We sloshed our way through the snow to the North side of the camp. There it was: the only remaining gas chamber.

I timidly walked in through the stained door that thousands had never walked out of. Straight ahead was a room with incinerators. To the right was a dark stone room with smooth walls. Thin metal pipes ran the walls like a skeleton. I noticed vertical scratches in the wall and tried not to imagine the manner in which they had been made. I felt physically ill and stepped back out into the blaring light of the sun.

There were rows of barracks. Many had been converted into museums, but I walked past them until I found one in its original form. I stepped inside and looked around. To the right were the officers’ quarters. To the left was a wash room where women were forced to undress before being lined up at “the wall of death” right outside and shot.

We returned to the bus and people’s eyes met with the awkwardness of running into an old friend at a funeral. I drank a sip of water not because I was thirsty but because I knew I should be.

The bus pulled away and arrived at Birkenau a few minutes later. Birkenau was expansive. There were fields of brick chimneys whose crude barracks had broken down and been cleared away. The sheer size of Birkenau was the scariest part of it. It was too vast to comprehend.

Back on the bus we finished Schindler’s List, which the rest of the group had started on the way to Kraków. The end of Schindler’s List is the most powerful bit of movie making I’ve ever seen: “This pin. Two people. This is gold. Two more people…”

My thoughts returned to the gas chamber after the movie ended. All those people who died… Sadness surged within me and tears streamed down my cheeks.