Day 7 - Poland - Ellie & Ruby
Out of all the tours of concentration camps, extermination camps, mass graves and forests, today’s tour of Auschwitz would definitely be the most anticipated and challenging. Exhausted faces filled the room while eating breakfast and carried on through to shacharit. We all knew it was coming, the day we dreaded but we have also been awaiting, the much dreaded Auschwitz - Birkenau.
Before today, Auschwitz - Birkenau, to us, it was just a ‘camp’... an unbelievable story in our history books. It was a camp we had learnt about at school, filled with the worst horrors of our history and the abominable crimes committed against humanity in one of the darkest times known to man - a nightmare. But today, it was real. A year of studying the Shoah and completing our Hans Kimmel couldn’t have prepared us for what it felt like to stand on the same ground that of our fellow Jews, who suffered through the unimaginable, stood almost 80 years ago.
As we walked through the infamous gate, “Arbeit Macht Frei - Work Sets You Free” we felt the spirits of thousands of Jews who unknowingly walked to their deaths, entering the very same gates, but never getting the privilege of walking back out.
Auschwitz I, established in October 1941, stands now as a museum that showcases the tragedies that our people were subjected to.
We walked through the seemingly endless and expansive camp, beyond the size any of us had imagined. Rugged up in our heavy duty snow boots and Kathmandu jackets while still feeling the harsh wind of the Polish air, we couldn’t help but think of how our ancestors were forced to march down these same gravel paths, in only a pair of pyjamas and worn-out shoes.
Inside the barracks that had been turned into exhibitions, we saw displays of over seven tonnes of prisoner’s hair, a humiliating and harmful process for many women. From there we walked into a room that displayed thousands of prisoners shoes - shoes of fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers and babies. All of which had with a unique story. A life that these people experienced within their shoes but were deprived of, simply because they were Jewish.
A similar sense of the dehumanisation was represented through a display of suitcases, each with a name of its past owner. Jews were forced to empty out their suitcases to be searched for valuables and now the hollow cases are all that remains of their memory.
Our tour guide, Martin, then told us of the devastating effects of malnutrition during the Holocaust. We learnt about a 32 year old woman who left the camp weighing only 23 kilos, the weight of an average seven year old child. The frustration and sorrow of this story shocked us to our cores, confronting us with the reality of these heinous crimes.
Outside Block 6, the children’s block, where so many innocent children were subject to Dr Mengeles horrific and torturous experiments, we stood on the very soil where hundreds of Jews were executed in mass killings without a second thought. With a heavy sadness we walked to another part of the museum which portrayed the rich Jewish life in Poland before the Shoah. It hurt to watch the rich history, fruitful culture and years of Jewish tradition that once thrived in Eastern Europe, be nothing more than a film on a screen.
Throughout our time in Auschwitz, testimonies were also given by our fellow peers, telling stories of their families tragic experiences in Auschwitz during the war.
We walked through hallways filled floor to ceiling with identification photos of prisoners. Their eyes filled with sorrow, men and women alike, displaying extreme hunger, exhaustion and psychological scars from the traumas they had endured.
We reached our final destination in Auschwitz I, the book of names. 16,000 pages of individual lives that were stolen. The pages held the names of over 4 million people of all ages, nationalities and ethnic groups. Today, Yad Vashem continues to search for names of those murdered in Auschwitz to add to this book.
Approaching the notorious Birkenau extermination camp, we tried our best to prepare ourselves. The feeling of standing there, at the gate to Birkenau, with thick fog blocking our view and cool sharp winds blowing past us was unexplainable.
We were immediately captivated by the train tracks, the ones that led innocent people to their Selektion and inevitable death.
A feeling of disgust filled our bodies as we saw the bombed crematoriums and gas chambers that murdered 1.1 million of our people.
Throughout the tour of Birkenau we learnt about the different barracks. One which was meant to keep around 50 horses but instead encaged hundreds of prisoners in horrific conditions, kitchens where very small amounts of food were made and the bathrooms and rooms for disinfection known as “the sauna”.
We saw pits filled with the ashes of prisoners that the Nazis burnt but had no room to store. Mark, our guide, informed us that these pits had been rained on and formed a sort of murky, ashy lake. The ashes at the bottom of the pits were so thick, that the rain water couldn’t soak through, thus why the lakes were still there today.
After an intense day at Auschwitz 1 and Birkenau, we got onto the buses to travel to a shule in Ocwiscem. There, we davened maariv, sang a soulful Hatikvah and listened to Tsachi, one of our guides, speak about Jewish continuity and the Shoah. Jacob Whitmont told his family’s moving story of his talit that was 171 years old and was passed down through generations, through the Holocaust and finally given to him at his bar mitzvah, only a few years ago.
Today’s long and confronting day at Auschwitz, as well as the culmination of sites, emotions and learning we have experienced over the past week in Poland, will forever change the way we understand and memorialise our people’s heritage.
As our journey in Poland comes to a close, we look forward to continuing this incredible experience of understanding our heritage in Israel!
