Before the Poland excursion, when I heard “Poland” I could only envision an icy landscape, small towns, and a concentration camp. It shows how much I, clearly, don’t know about the world. The funny thing is that nobody talks about Poland once the issue of the concentration camps has passed. Nobody bothers to discuss the vibrancy and bustle amidst the art and architecture of Krakow. Even when you leave Krakow the goodness doesn’t end because you find a quaint tranquility in Wadowice. These lovely bits of our visit to Poland seem almost unfairly idyllic when juxtaposed with Auschwitz.
Let’s talk about Auschwitz:
Everyone on the bus knew that the day ahead was going to be intense but no level of preparation could predict any given person’s reaction. I expected to cry and to leave feeling a bit sad. However, as I witnessed the remains of the atrocities done to women I didn’t have the ability to be sad or feel sympathy. I felt pure and undiluted rage and disgust. What kind of mind invents this stuff? The part that was the worst for me was not the crematorium’s walls that just seeped with pain, or the isolation cells in Block 11, the death that lingers in the air sixty years later, the unnatural cold, and not even the gallows. What hit me like a giant school bus were three things:
At Auschwitz there is this room with a glass encasement full of hair. You’d never guess how haunting a mountain of human hair can be. The huge mound of human hair sits behind the glass in one of the exhibits. I’ve never seen such an ungodly amount of human hair as was preserved behind this glass. The Nazi’s had kept it to sell to factories or to use for other sick purposes. I walked into the room that held the hair and took in a sharp breath. The amount of hair gave a really tangible estimation of just how many people were murdered at Auschwitz. It was like a wall of hair. I walked up and down it trying to wrap my brain around all of this hair. There were so many different textures, lengths, but the colors had mostly faded into the same deadened brown, save a few red and blonde pieces. They say a woman’s hair is her crown and countless women had been stripped of their crowns. I stood there staring at the pile of crowns that would never again find their owners. A woman’s hair is something intimate. For a woman, it’s not just dead skin cells that hang around her face. Rather, it’s that thing you fidget with when you’re nervous, or hide behind, or that other people run their fingers through to show affection. Even when a woman is completely naked she still has her hair to wrap around her but the women at Auschwitz were not permitted to keep even that. The Nazi’s literally took everything. For what? To make blankets from the hair, to sell to factories for a few paltry dollars, or to completely strip their victims of any semblance of humanity? It seemed it was to completely break the human spirit.
Just like the mountain of hair, there was a huge mound of shoes behind another glass wall. I’d wager there were a few thousand pairs of shoes in there. Some of the most fabulous shoes I’ve ever seen were in there and each was a haunting reflection of the lives people had led before Auschwitz. Shoes tell you a great deal about people and their values. The style of the shoe shows if they value comfort above all, if appearance is number one or if they have a nice balance between the two. They give clues to where their wearers are going and where they come from. There was a pair of cream and red flowered pumps, a pair of cream and green wedges, ballet flats, and worst of all, shoes small enough for a child.
These traces of humanity made the rest of the time at Auschwitz much more powerful. These traces turned the experience into something more personal because now I couldn’t help but think about real, individual people, not just an ambiguous mob of prisoners. Trying to imagine what it would be like to have someone take everything from me in order to kill my spirit before murdering me was almost impossible. I couldn’t picture anyone living that way. It’s almost like they exterminated the spirit so they could more easily kill the body and throw it out.
The part that spoke the loudest to me was the covered windows across from block 11, right above the execution area. The windows hid the experiments of a gynecologist who used young Jewish girls to test contraceptives and other such things. What more could they take from these woman? They had their family, their possessions, their freedom, their hair, everything, yet now they would take the last semblance of femininity and treat it like a Petri dish. Taking shoes is one thing but taking a woman’s uterus is on a whole other level of depersonalization: No love but pure torture—complete and total objectification. The girls became like “its.” The screams that came through those windows must have been gut-wrenching.
The only comparison that came to me was the image of the indigenous people who used every bit of the animals they killed. They wasted nothing and got as much out of each kill as possible. The Nazi’s used every bit and left close to nothing for their victims to clutch in the aftermath.
After learning about incommunicability, depersonalization, and the “I” each person possesses in Philosophy of the Human Person, it was so clear just which elements of the person were violated during the Holocaust. Yet, as our group ended the day at the death camps with the Chaplet of Divine Mercy, I realized that these crimes leave no more room for hate but only mercy. A lack of mercy and an abundance of hate are what propelled the Holocaust to begin with. I didn’t leave Auschwitz angry, though. I couldn’t. It would have been an injustice to the memory of those who suffered. I left with a better understanding of humanity and the need for love as our only motive. The atrocities I witnessed in that one day were a call to love, not just for me but for everyone. Let’s love.
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