Terezin & Auschwitz

Terezin and Auschwitz are two experiences that I will never forget and two places in which the events that took place will not be understood by simply studying them.  Even visiting and walking the same grounds were the Holocaust occurred will not be enough to comprehend it and to assimilate it.  One cannot even imagine what the people that suffered and survived these concentration camps felt in flesh.  From my own experience, being there was not enough.

Going to Terezin I expected a much bigger concentration camp, but I was surprised by its small terrain.  I can’t imagine the conditions in which people suffered from the overcrowding.  Walking in the camp and going from room to room I tried to imagine the people that went through there.  Even in my mind there was still space, not even then I could picture so many people as 600 in a barrack.  One room that stands out in my memory is the shower room.  I felt anxious there, maybe because a gas chamber came into my mind.  The atmosphere in this room was different than in all the others.  It was sort of more personal, something that I can’t really describe.  The other room that I will not forget was the punishment cell, where the only light and air came through a little square hole in the wall.  Up to 60 people were there at one time.  It must have been unbearable, worse than anything I have ever felt or been through in my life.  It is crazy how the Nazi tortured and took away everything from their victims.  They did not even have their dignity or a sense of self.  The cemetery is a great tribute to those who died after liberation and those who were buried in the mass grave.  I did not know that the rocks over the tomb stones meant prayers that visitors left.  Now I understand why there were so many in almost every tomb stone in the cemetery.  Visiting Terezin before Auschwitz was good because it prepared the grown for what we could seen in the actual extermination camp.

Auschwitz was hard to take in.  It was a fast tour and on some parts of it I wanted to just pay more attention to the detail, to trying to understand what the entrance gate meant, what every room we walked through was used for and realizing that the things exhibited there belonged to someone.  That every shoe had been worn, the hair had been combed and braided, the clothes had been worn by babies, and that the many objects had been used by human beings that were treated worse than animals by other human beings.  It is hard for me to understand how a person could have done that to so many people without remorse and guilt.  They had no conscience whatsoever.

Birkenau was the most impressive to me.  When I watched Schildler’s List, the part where the train of women get taken to Auschwitz and there train arrives and passes through the main gate gave me chills and a weird feeling in the bottom of my stomach.  In that moment, I really did not want to go there.  When we went and we were right next to the rail tracks, I remembered the movie and the images of ran through my mind.  I did not know what to think, what to say.  There was nothing to say.  I was there, standing in the same spot as many other people back then.  The experiences are for from comparable. Walking the strip were millions of others took the last steps of their life was very emotional.  I wanted to pay my respects towards all the victims died there, and for a moment I wanted to say a silent prayer but then I did not know if it would be appropriate.  I do pray for the rest of their souls and they will not be forgotten.

This experience did strengthen my understanding of the Holocaust.  I must say that some things I will not look at the same way after this.  One of them is a chimney.  As we were leaving the site, I could see houses with black, and sometimes white, smoke coming out of the chimney and I could not stop myself from thinking about the chimneys in the crematoria.  Many things will not be the same after studying the Holocaust.  There is still so much that I would like to study about it.  I would like to hear a live testimony of a survivor.  I feel that it would help me understand it further and more genuinely.