I was on vacation in Poland, and I can't spell the name of the city, but I visited Auschwitz. I was born into a Jewish family, and I'd always known that not every relative of mine that was intered into a camp had made it out alive.
I didn't know what had happened to great uncles, and what would have been second cousins if they were still alive. Until I read the list of victims near the gates to Aushwitz-Birkenau.
All five of my family's names were written on that list. From ages six months, to ninety seven, I read what happened to them as I walked, completely silent, where they died so many years ago.
You don't cry there, I noticed. It was a mass funeral sight, and you can still walk past the ditches they were thrown in, whether dead, or nearly there, and the crematoriums, and gas chambers where they thought they were going to be bathed, and deloused.
They were decieved, and mass-murdered on the spot.
They have exhibits there. Cases full of their suitcases, and shoes, baby clothes that those children never had a chance to grow out of.
I was horrified, but I didn't leave. I could practically hear them telling me to keep walking, and to relive what they had to endure.
The Germans tried bombing their own camps, trying to cover up the evidence of the unspeakable, inhuman evil they'd demonstrated on the Roma, homosexual, and Jewish population of all of Europe.
I saw my last names on tattered suitcases. My family never knew when stepping out of their jam-packed cattle cars that they would never see their only possesions again.
I learned of the numbers, tattooed on their forearms, that replaced their names. 61536 was my mother's aunt, she was pregnant on arrival. She was split off from the rest of her family, and immediately sent to the gas chambers.
Not only did they kill her, and the child, but they killed 61,535 people before them. They didn't stop there.
I was looking through some of my great-grandfather's things. He was deemed capable of labor, so he was kept alive. He was there six years before the American troops liberated Auschwitz.
He died around the time I was born. Now, on my bedside table, is the golden piece of fabric labled "Jude".
My family legacy, branded like animals, still wanders the sight of their death. Just like the millions of others who died with them.
I could hear each and every one of their voices, even after I walked out of the gates, and back to the parking lot.
Not registered?
Create an account