March 12, 2013
 |
| Barrack at Birkenau |
Birkenau is so different from Auschwitz I. The size of this camp is equal to two-hundred
soccer fields. Imagine that. Imagine that space full of people: starving, freezing people, walking
skeletons. The vast amount of Jews that
entered this camp and did not make it out alive is unfathomable. Imagine that one person died six million
times. Someone close to you that you
were forced to lose over and over again:
six million times. Everyone that
died was someone’s child, sibling, parent, or spouse. Imagine feeling the loss of one of your loved
ones six million times. Even this, I am
sure, is hard to imagine. For the people
who suffered in the concentration camps, this did not have to be imagined: this was a reality.
Due to the amount of people that were murdered, the Nazis
had to think of a way to get rid of all the bodies faster. To do so, they forced the prisoners to dig
ditches to place the bodies and burn them.
I saw those ditches, still full with pounds and pounds of human ashes
and shards of crushed bones left over from someone’s child, sibling, parent, or
spouse.
Not all of the six million Jews died at Birkenau, but a lot
of them did. Walking through the camp
today, I tripped and fell. The roads are
very uneven and full of scattered stones.
Being a naturally clumsy person, I am not surprised at all that I fell
and I got right back up and continued on my way. Then it hit me. If I was a prisoner there while the camp was
active, I would have been shot and killed on the spot just for falling. Getting back up would not have been so easy
for me. It would have been the end of
me.
Having this happen really put some things into perspective
for me. Walking the land of the camp, it
is so easy to trip and fall or slip in the mud, especially for the prisoners
who were already very weak. Things like
this happen so quickly, and in that quick time, I could have died, only to
become a small part of the huge pile of ashes and bone that is still present in
the camp.
This reflects back on the Holocaust as a whole. The Nazis began taking over so quickly, and
just as quickly, the innocent began being murdered, imprisoned, kidnapped, or
forced into doing hard labor. None of
these things were consequences for me from falling down, but they were for
someone: someone who could have easily
been murdered in the same spot that I fell.
This is surreal.
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