Work Doesn't Set You Free

As I am writing this, it is still surreal to me that I am in Poland, let alone in Oswiecim, where Auschwitz 1 is located. We have all gotten used to our living arrangements and being in a foreign country, but some of us, like myself, are still not used to the time difference. Although my sleep schedule is a mess, it gives me time at night to reflect on the day, which helps me follow the reasons why I am here, to witness and to learn. Over the past few days, we have visited the concentration camps of Auschwitz 1 and Auschwitz Birkenau. I went in with indescribably unknown expectations, and I was eager to embark on this experience of a lifetime.  As we walked over from our home away from home to Auschwitz 1, we were full of energy, and didn’t fully understand how our day and lives were about to change as we walked under the unsettling but prominent sign at the entrance of Auschwitz that reads “Arbeit Macht Frei,” which means “work sets you free.”

As we were walking over, the first thing that we saw was an old, grey building that looks like it hasn’t been touched in dozens of years. This building was the building where all of the prisoners arrived to the camp from their train cars, and you could still see the ruins of the rusty railroad tracks that led through the town and up to the building. From the moment I saw this building and the rusty railroad tracks, this experience became real for me, and I finally felt like I was in the presence of where all of this had happened. As soon as we walked onto the grounds of Auschwitz 1, our tour had begun, and we had received some unsettling facts. I thought that I had known a lot about Auschwitz and the Holocaust as a whole, but some of the facts hit me hard. I was told that there were up to one thousand people in each building at one point, and if I were asked how many people I would say could fit in each building comfortably, I would have said fifty. I could not even imagine fitting over 200 people in that building, let alone five times that. As we passed by the crematorium, I felt my stomach turn for the first time. We were told that up to 1,500 bodies were cremated per day, and there were up to 2,000 dead bodies per pile. When I heard this, I realized that they were killing more than 1,500 Jews per day. Over 1,500 people lost their innocent life every day, and there was nothing they could do about it. Before the war, there was around a 3.3 million Jewish population in Poland, which was one the biggest Jewish communities. Today in Poland, that number is drastically reduced. When standing on the grounds of these concentration, I was trying to think of words to describe what I was looking at, and one word that kept reoccurring was ‘hell’. The Holocaust, Auschwitz, and every death camp was the real life hell, and I still have questions that may never have an answer to them.