Visiting Auschwitz

Yesterday was a long but very interesting day. We visited the concentration camp of Auschwitz. I will work on posting more pictures another time but I wanted to at least show you this first picture. Just outside the death block where people went to be in the a cell or just before they were killed there is a "killing wall." This is when people were shot to death. The original stones are no longer there but more of memorial is setup. People have placed flowers around it. If you are just looking you'll miss this stone but what the stone says is so powerful I caught my attention. "Never Forget, Never forgive" That's difficult to see in this place. If we aren't forgiving then we are bound to repeat what happened before and not willing to learn from the mistakes of the past. But i think this is so real about how we hold on to our hurt and pain!

Anyways, it was a very powerful experience. I am glad I went, but I don't know if I will go again. We had a great tour guide who asked us questions to help us question why things happened the way they did. There was a point where I wanted to pause her and just walk and just be in silence and get a feel for being there. In many ways it was a rather fast time even though we were there for 3 hours. There is just so much to process and look over. Just as you start the tour she gives you the "rules" and explains that this is considered a graveyard and we want to respect it and treat it as that. So much of it real and left just the way it was. It is very surreal walking down the halls and standing in the cells that so many people once walked, suffered and eventually died at. There are specific buildings that are set up for the tours and the others are blocked off and you don't visit them. But a couple I could see in the windows and saw the beds lined up. The tour is ended with walking through the gas chamber and crematory. I once watched a documentary one the concentration camps and I don't remember much except for the part that they talked about in the gas chamber you could see scratches of where people clawed at the walls when the cyclone B was released.

Once we left and were traveling home that's when I started thinking through what the lady shared with us and started to grasp the impact of what I just saw. We went to both sites of the camp and walked where the people were sorted and where the trains would pull into. One story that I remember was down in the jail cell. One doctor did experiments on kids. It ranged from mutilation to starvation and anything you couldn't even imagine. There were some kids who were being tortured and starved. A priest found out about this and came to the guards and said that he wanted to trade places with them. They granted him this wish. The only thing is that he was able to survive for 2 weeks. They were so shocked by this and didn't like it that they eventually poisoned him. In the past couple of years the pope traveled to this cell and offered a blessing.

We were shown rooms where leftover things were put on to display. We saw hair and what they made with the hair, eye glasses, shoes, pots and pans, toothbrushes, and suitcases. The suitcases were especially difficult. They had on them the name and age of the person. Some young kids bags even had the word "waisfnkind" which means orphan....they had no idea.

The last thing I will share right now is about appearances. Our guide made sure that we understood that many things were in place to assure the community that this was a "good" place and the people here were bad. Since it was originally a prison they had many statements about what the people had "done wrong." And a lot of death certificates had cause of death due to an illness even though it was usually starvation or torture. Documents were forged, the grounds were kept clean, and evidence was destroyed. On the outside people had no idea what was going on and people got up and went to work as if nothing was wrong and went home again after abusing and destroying peoples lives.