Reliving the Holocaust

Millions of Jews, Poles, Gypsies, elderly and disabled people considered "useless feeders" by the Nazis died in World War II, but there are so few traces left of their existence.  The once vibrant Jewish communities are all but gone in Poland.  Synagogues burnt out and turned into museums.  Only a few broken headstones remain in deserted Jewish cemeteries, the rest of them used to pave roads by people now in unmarked graves.  They may have torn down the walls and barbed wire surrounding the ghettos, but no one will ever erase the blood spilled within them.

The ashes of people incinerated in Birkenau still covers the barren grounds, along with the possessions they left behind, including:

2 tons of human shaven from women deported to the camp
80,000 shoes
12,000 pots
6,000 pieces of art
3,000 suitcases
2,000 family photographs
40 kg of spectacles
460 artificial limbs
40 m of melted metal objects from the Canada warehouses.

Inmates were forced to send letters and postcards saying they were well, but most of the people who wrote them were dead long before their letters were received.   At Auschwitz there are archives of 8,000 of these letters and postcards.

The day I visited Auschwitz was extremely hot and humid.  As I walked around with a bottle of water and a chicken sandwich, I was well aware that this was much more than the inmates would have had to eat or drink.  They would have been given coffee flavored water for breakfast, watery soup for lunch, and more watered down coffee with a hunk of stale bread for dinner.  With these meager rations, they were expected to perform 12 hours of back breaking work and then stand for hours for roll call.

For a place so evil, I was struck by how benign these former army barracks looked until you saw their gruesome contents. Auschwitz will always be a reminder of how low human beings can sink, not those who were the victims of these depraved crimes, but their perpetrators.  The empty chairs below in the ghetto in Krakow commemorate the many people who are no longer here to sit in them.