Jessalyn: What Would You Do?

On the third day here in Poland, I awoke to yet another dreary day. Cold and rainy, our group walked over to Auschwitz I to see the largest extermination camp established by the Germans. How fitting that the day we would be visiting Auschwitz I, it happened to be the worst weather we have experienced thus far. The gloomy weather made me ponder whether this is what many of the Jews and the other oppressed people felt when marching from concentration camp to concentration camp or even to their deaths.

Besides noticing the weather and how that must have affected the prisoner’s moods, two other things struck out to me today. The first was when we began our tour at Auschwitz I. Jacek, our tour guide, led us to a photo of a grandmother holding her grandchild. Apparently many women who entered Auschwitz I with children were told to pass their children off to the children’s grandmother, the woman’s own mother. The women were told to trust in this decision because it could lead to saving their lives.

Making the connection as Jacek proceeded to the next photo, I realized that mother’s from all over Europe had to decide between leaving their children for death in order to ensure a better chance of their own survival or willingly go to the gas chamber with their offspring. How monumental a decision like this would be. Lena Donat, a holocaust survivor who tells a part of her story in her husband’s book, “The Holocaust Kingdom”, makes an imperative decision such as this when living in the demolishing Warsaw Ghetto. Lena and her husband, Alexander, had to decide to leave their child Wlodek with an Aryan family friend when they realized it was unsafe for their child to stay with them anymore. Although this decision is less extreme than directly sending her child to the gas chamber, Lena ultimately had to leave her child who could possibly face death in the future. She states, “I refused to consider what my own end would be like. I knew only one thing: I had a son in Warsaw and I must stay alive” (163).   

I would like to assume that most mothers held onto their children and took the selfless path when deciding to go left or right like Lena did. I would like to think the women held out to the very end and protected their children by holding their hands to comfort them in their last moments. I would like to think that I would do the same…. But what about the ones that didn’t? Would the women survive the guilt they would forever endure or perish due to the blame they placed on themselves?

I realize no one can answer these questions I ponder except the women who experienced this. Neither I nor anybody else can say which path they would have taken until truly placed in this position. The Nazis placed millions of men and women in unthinkable situations and it is now going to the place these traumatic experiences happened that I finally realize just how much I will never truly understand the difficult decisions made by prisoners, for the good or bad, during the Shoah.