Majdanek

I saw many concentration camps, but it took this one camp to finally strike a nerve. 

We had been traveling in Poland for almost a week. We had seen several concentration camps, walked through abandoned ghettos, crawled through destroyed villages, and even visited mass graves where people were buried beneath the earth, without a tombstone to remember them.

For some reason, none of what I was seeing was really connecting for me. Sure, I was a Jew, and I even had a Holocaust survivor in my family. Everyone else in my group was sobbing and broken as we stopped at the various heart-stopping locations, but it just didn’t strike me as much as it did for the others in my group.

Was there something wrong with me? As I threw a handful of Jerusalem soil into the pits of ‘Ponar’, a mass grave in Lithuania where innocent people were massacared, I just couldn’t shed a single tear. As we visited Treblinka, a village where there are literally a plethora of stones representing families from all the villages that were murdered, I felt empty. When I was standing on the same train tracks that led these people to their fate, I suddenly could hear the spooky, faint sounds of real trains choo-chooing beyond the camp in the background. Even then, I still didn’t wince.

Finally, we reached Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp-one of the most well-known camps in WWII history, with the most deaths out of all the camps. Surely, walking through this camp would bother me, right? We walked by the electric fences, stepped through the museum that displayed real human hair, and heard a nightmare of stories about experiments that were done on innocent Jews. We walked through the rooms where the new prisoners got their heads shaved, took showers, and received the number tattoos on their arms, losing their identities completely. We stood in a group as our tour leader explained to us that the two poles that were facing eachother in the alleyway in front of us were used to hang the prisoners. If they weren’t hanged, then there was a wall in the back of the alley was where prisoners were told to stand up with their backs against it, as a Nazi soilder lifted up a gun and shot them, without any breath of remorse.

Those stories and visualizations struck a nerve, but only a pinch. We walked through the barracks, saw the bombed buildings laying in an untouched mess, and even saw the holes in the cement that the prisoners used as their toilet. We heard love stories of people in the camps, that through all the pain and struggle, managed to keep a bit of hope with their signifigant other-until the camps were finally liberated, and they sadly found out that the one person keeping them alive, did not make it out.

Still, I wasn’t connecting. Now, I really thought something was wrong with me. Here I was, at the most infamous death camp in history and I didn’t budge. I walked beneath the “Arbeit Mach Friet” sign, (before it was stolen), and I suppose it felt surreal. Still not shedding a single drizzle of a tear, we left the camp, by exiting on the exact same entrance the Jews arrived in on boxcars. The same train tracks where if they were lucky enough to survive the credulous journey, were forced out only to be separated from their families. Men-to the right, women and children to the left-or the gas chambers.

A famous picture I have seen in my textbooks, was now my canvas. Myself, and the 48 other people in my group, walked with our heads down across the same train tracks that meant hell for thousands of people. I was lucky enough to be able to walk right out of this camp without anybody stopping me, and although I thought about the irony of it, I still felt no emotion. With Israeli flags on our back, and our minds racing, we trudged through the mud and rain on the tracks, singing “Od Yavo Shalom”, an Israeli song about peace. Muttering under my breath, I sang along the lyrics that I knew so well, but my prescense was drifting into the air just as swiftly as the words slid off my lips. Everyone around me crying, unable to speak, and me just waiting for that moment when it would finally hit me; the trauma my ancestors experienced 70 years prior to my own footsteps being there.

The Eastern Europe trip was almost over. People were already in the mindset for Israel, since in a few days we would be heading there. We would be leaving the memories of the camps engraved in our hearts and our minds, but not in our skin, like the prisoners. It was one of the last days, as we headed to “Madjanek”, a camp that is said to be so unaltered from it’s original state, that it could easily be up and running again in 36 hours.

The weather, like usual in Poland, was unpleasant. Although it was smack in the middle of summer, it was rainy-but not the kind of rain where it falls in the same direction, and you can wear a rainjacket and feel wet, but okay. This rain was hot and humid, sporadic, and made the skies look like the apocalypse was a deep, haunting gray approaching. There was not even a bit of sunshine trying to break through the depressing clouds-just a blanket of weariness above.

We headed towards the entrance of the camp-me just thinking, “I cannot wait to be done with this shit, it is so fucking depressing and I cannot even relate”. From outside the camp walls, you could see the towers for the SS guards that would have been able to see any movement within the camp.

Then, we made our way inside the camp. After being given a brief lecture of the history of the camp by our tour guide, Oren, I was ready to get back on the bus, fall asleep, and get out of my soggy clothes. Little did I know what was about to hit me.

We headed into a barrack. A small bunk, kind of like the one you may see at a sleepaway camp, but literally filled with bunk bed frames, crammed next to eachother from the front door to the back of the barrack. No lights of course, mattresses, pillows, decorations-just flabs of material for the prisoners to sleep on after a treachourous day of slavery in the camp.

I remember thinking “this must have been uncomfortable, sleeping on one of those for months, and years…”, when Oren said, “In these beds, there were sometimes 5-8 people sharing one together.” My heart stopped. Really, I was complaining about my exhaustion and dreaming of my hostel bed waiting for me after the trip, and these innocent people had to share these tiny ass beds with 7 other people? 7 other people who were sick, diseased, tired, famished, with no body fat on them to even try to keep eachother warm during the brutal winters. I also remember thinking how cold I was, in my Eddie Bauer windbreaker, and my cotton black leggings.

I was getting annoyed at my frizzy hair falling into my face, and the mud stuck to my shoes. I hated myself, complaining about these small discomforts, after realizing how truly awful and unimaginable the conditions were for these people-and for so long. But now, I could at last imagine it. It was right in front of my eyes for me to see, but I would not be forced to sleep there like my ancestors. I would not be freezing, trying to get warm. I would not have back pains and bed sores, or sickness all around me, without a bathroom easy to get to. No, I was going home to my hostel after a heated bus ride, where I could take a nice, warm shower, alone, and fall asleep under fresh sheets and fluffed pillows.

All of a sudden, like a firework, a tear developed in my eye. Then another. Then another. Until I was crying into my friend’s arm, the idea hitting me like a curveball right in the chest, and all the experiences prior to this day building up and attacking me all at once. Eventually, I calmed down, thanks to my friend’s bear-like hugs and nods of understanding, and braced myself for whatever else was coming.

Next, we headed into another barrack. Except, unlike the other one that was filled with beds, this was filled with cages and cages of shoes. The shoes were the real ones taken from the victims when they came into the camp, and as a memory, they were put into these cages for people to see. It was kind of like when your school filled a jar with a large amount of jelly beans, and you had to guess how many were in there. Except, if I guessed right, I didn’t get a prize-just a realization that these shoes belonged to people, were worn on their feet that molded the soles into their individual shape so that the shoe was a perfect fit for them. There had to be hundreds of thousands pairs of old-fashioned leather shoes.

I walked up to the cage, and gazed inside. What I saw next knocked the wind out of my breath. I saw a few pairs of little shoes, that must have belonged to children no older than 3. Immediately, I thought of my little cousins who I adored and loved so much-unable to face the fact that those shoes may have been those of another person’s child, or sibling, taken away from them before those precious babies even got the chance to learn how to tie them themselves.

For the rest of our time in this camp, we walked through gas chambers where we could see desperate scratch marks of people left in the cement as they fought to escape their deaths, a giant crematorium, and a large dome carrying the remains of those who were murdered. Eventually, we arrived in Israel, and slowly but surely, our experiences in the camps became merely memories. I can always look at pictures to remember or visit again one day, but I will never forget the way I felt that day in Majdanek, just as we should never forget the six million who were lost.

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.- Martin Niemöller