The Labyrinth

Through my journey to Poland, I was exposed to more than I could have ever imagined. Hearing stories from those who survived the devastating Shoah, speaking with so many intellectual professors, and exploring art exhibits and museums that vividly explain the agony people endured during this time. One place we visited that truly stuck out to me was The Labyrinths, which is the most vividly illustrated work I have ever seen. 

      This is not an exhibition, nor art. These are not pictures. These are words locked in drawings…I propose a journey by way of this labyrinth marked by the experience of the fabric of death…It is a rendering of honor to all those who have vanished in ashes. (Marian Kolodziej)

Marian Kolodziej, later known as number 432, was one of the first transports to enter Auschwitz. He managed to survive the life in the camp but didn’t speak about his experience until nearly 50 years later. In 1993 he had a serious stroke and as part of his rehabilitation process began drawing, and drew what he was a witness to in the concentration camps. His drawings vividly show the pain, death, and horror he and other prisoners faced. One of the jobs Kolodziej was assigned to work at during his time in the camp was at the crematorium. The heartache associated with being responsible for loading up wheelbarrows with dead bodies to transport to the crematorium is clearly showcased in several of his drawings.

The Labyrinth takes you on a journey of the horrific reality of the holocaust, putting faces to situations you have only read about. You always hear the prisoners of the camps being referred to as “walking skeletons” but these illustrations are what bring that expression to life. To these unfortunate victims so frail and thin while being forced to do such hard labor. In every illustration Kolodziej draws of a prisoner he draws them with large, swollen feet. To me this kind of took me by surprise. Having the prisoners drawn this way is a perfect illustration to show just how overworked these people were. When reading stories about prisoners and the forced labor you understand that they are overworked and tired but you never realize just how much they suffered until you see a picture like that. I recall Sister Mary telling us that the prisoners were only allowed 2 hours of free time on Sunday’s. For the amount of work these people endured 2 hours of free time once a week is nothing to allow their bodies to recuperate. These people are worked so vigorously with little to no food to provide them energy for such tasks, and these illustrations by Marian Kolodziej do a more than perfect job at providing a visual illustration to what these people looked like as a result. 

As you walk around The Labyrinth in random places almost on every turn you see pictures of an eye, always watching you. Seeing a couple at first I figured it was just a coincidence but after seeing several one after the other I figured there had to be a deeper meaning behind this. I asked Sister Mary and she said that the reason for this was because inside the camps there were always eyes watching you. The Nazis were always watching the prisoners to make sure everything remained in the orderly fashion, but it was also to represent one prisoner watching another. Some did it for the sole fact of looking out for one another but others did it because if a prisoner saw something out of character they could report it to the guard and get rewarded. Everyone always had their eyes on you but you didn’t know for what reason. Having just images of eyes watching you was unsettling enough I couldn’t even imagine what it actually must have felt like for the prisoners. They were scared, weak, and afraid and had to watch every move they make. 

The Labyrinth completely opened me up to a new visual perspective of the holocaust I never expected to see. 

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Our Obligations as Witnesses

Walking along the fences that they walked along, feeling that similar feeling of being contained, nothing can compare to it. Visiting the grounds of Auschwitz was an experience that I will hold with me for as long as I live. Nothing can prepare you for how thick the air feels or how it feels almost wrong with each step you take.

            My decision to travel to Poland with this class was not a quick or easy one. I have Jewish heritage and know that none of my family members were enslaved at these camps. Still the thought of all the Jewish blood spilled and the fate my family members narrowly missed was jarring. I made the choice to join this excursion and face in person the atrocities that played out in Auschwitz.  

            Entering the grounds under the infamous gate was like entering into another world. Stepping through and feeling a rush of calm understanding rush over me. A respect demands to be felt when you walk the pathways. Recalling everything that we had learned in class and finally being in the place where it all transpired, a sort of spell falls over you. Everything you see, you see through different eyes. Every innocent looking structure was the home of murder, torture, and suffering. These people had gone through so much in this camp and now we walk the same dirt roads as they did, learning about what we are obligated to do as witnesses.

            Each building we were able to enter showed us yet another aspect of life in the camps that we could not hope to fully understand. We were shown building with beds lining the room where people were forced to sleep not knowing if they would survive the next day. Beds where siblings, parents, and children were separated and never knew if their family was alive or dead, no comfort came in the night in those rooms.

            Our job is to bear witness to what happened years ago to so many people from many different groups and never allow it to occur again. We, the groups who have gone on this adventure together, have become witnesses to the Shoah. We have heard and seen the direct effect as well as the ripple effect of what happened in those camps and across the world. We now hold in our minds and our hearts, something that needs to be protected. We must protect what we have learned and protect the honor of the victims we lost. 

By: Cassie Sampogna

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Love Conquers Hatred: A reflection on what I've learned

“Forgiveness demonstrates the presence in the world of the love 

which is more powerful than sin.” 

- Pope John Paul II

This is just one of the quotes I wrote down from the Pope John Paul II museum, but I think it’s so powerful. We’ve now been back for a little over a month, and with the stress of the end of the semester between finals and papers due, our trip to Oswiecim seems so far away. However, I still think about what we learned in that short time away. One of the main things I realized is that there were so many things surrounding WWII and the Shoah that I will never be able to understand, and I definitely struggled with that realization for a while, even for a good few weeks after we were back. However, what we’ve learned and continue to learn has shown me that love and forgiveness overpowers the hatred that continues to exist in our world.

Fr. Manfred, one of the lecturers we were lucky enough to have at the Center for Dialogue and Prayer, spoke to us about love and about how God is manifested through love. He told us that it was through love that God was present during the Shoah – that it was through love that God was present in the camps. He made it easier for me to understand that though love isn’t always clear and isn’t present in every story from that dark time, some stories allow us to see it in action and in this way, to see how God was present during the Shoah.

He shared a few stories of his encounters with survivors who had different perspectives on this idea of love and of God’s presence. One survivor that he knew had survived Auschwitz II-Birkenau, but his job was to throw corpses into the burning fields every day. Because of this, he never felt God’s presence; he didn’t understand why they had to die, or why he had to burn them, and he would hope that people would come to help their situation. He would wonder where God was and continue to ask why; he couldn’t see God through the destruction or in the people that surrounded him. I found the next perspective interesting as well because of what Fr. Manfred had to say about it. This woman worked in the women’s camp in Birkenau and saw people go to the gas chambers; she asked Fr. Manfred what he meant by God, and she told him that because of what she saw there, she is unable to believe in God. She did say, though, that she believes in love. Fr. Manfred said to us something like, “who am I?” to tell her that it’s the same thing – that when you believe in love, “that is what I am talking about when I speak of God.” I found this powerful, as it is in alignment with the teaching of respect for all beliefs.

The next story is yet a different outlook: this man was also a survivor of Auschwitz-II Birkenau, and he was not religious when he was there. However, he said that his experience during the Shoah made him realize that it means something to be Jewish. He began to study and learn and found that whenever people helped one another, when they were good to one another, when they did something for another that costed more than it helped them, that that was God in action. When you do something out of love that costs more than you gain, this is God — and it just amazes me that he took this understanding away from his own experience at Birkenau.

I’ve decided that while it is true that I will most likely never understand many of aspects of the Shoah, I know now that understanding everything is not the point. The point is standing witness to the tragedies of the past as well as to the progress we’ve made as a human race. The point is the greater understanding of love and respect for one another as humans that has come out of this experience for me and for our class, and hopefully, for the world as a whole. I’ve realized that in my memories of our time in Auschwitz, I’m starting to see the love more than the hate. Of course it’s easier to see the love when you aren’t standing in the middle of where it all happened, where the hate allowed for the worst crimes against humanity to be committed, but the understanding of how far we’ve come along with the realization of how much further we need to go is something I’m lucky to have acquired from this once in a lifetime experience.

The Prayer of St. Francis, displayed in the Center for Dialogue and Prayer

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Hope in the Horror

Auschwitz II-Birkenau was enormous. Looking out from the guard’s watch tower at the main entrance, before even entering the camp, was an incredible experience. Just seeing the size of the camp was overwhelming. I was unable to stop myself from trying to imagine what it was like not even a century ago, when there were still all of the barracks and still people everywhere and still trains running through the middle of the grounds, delivering more innocent people to their deaths. We walked through one of the eight original barracks, we saw the makeshift beds that four or more prisoners would sleep on for so little time each night, and we walked along the tracks of the train that used to unload more and more people who would soon be sent to the gas chambers. We walked to the ruins of the gas chambers – the two huge gas chambers that SS guards blew up in an attempt to destroy the evidence of the crimes they were committing, because they knew that they were committing crimes – and we saw the two smaller gas chambers, one of which stood in front of fields where bodies were thrown into and burned. We witnessed the remains of the horrors of Auschwitz-II Birkenau. 

Items found during renovations of the barracks in 1960.

We also went back to Auschwitz I and had the opportunity to walk around freely without a tour guide. I liked it because we were allowed to wander in silence and take our time viewing the exhibits we wanted to spend extra time in. One amazing thing that I saw was this exhibit of items found in the barracks when they were being renovated. The caption explained: “They must have been hidden by a prisoner who was planning an escape.” Among the items were three pairs of shoes – men’s, women’s, and a very small pair for a child. I think this is kind of a symbol of hope – a sign that some prisoners still had hope. A family was trying so hard to stay together – their will to survive wasn’t defeated.

I think I expected this visit to the camp to be a little easier since we had already been there, but visiting Maximilian Kolbe’s cell for the second time was not easier. That one small space seemed to somehow embody all of the horrors of the camp and the atrocities that it stands to remind us of. Maximilian Kolbe is recognized as a Catholic saint and a martyr because when ten prisoners from his barrack were selected to die as a result of an escape made by another prisoner in their unit, one of the men cried, “My wife! My children!” This man was Franciszek Gajoqniczek, and he was saved by Maximilian Kolbe, who volunteered to die in his place. Along with the other nine selected prisoners, he was starved in cell 18, the starvation cell, though he didn’t ultimately die of starvation. He was prisoner 16670, but he was known as so much more than that number. He was known and continues to be known for this greatest act of love: the Gospel of John expresses that there is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for another, and that is what Maximilian Kolbe did. For me, this is the greatest example of love in the camps. His action itself was amazing, but one thing about it that was specifically brought to my attention was the immediacy with which he volunteered his life. He stepped forward right away – there was no time to think. He didn’t have to think twice about what he was doing to know it was the right thing to do. I find it a miracle that we are lucky enough to have an example of a fellow human that possessed that type of love for humanity.

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