Memorization

After coming back from Poland, I have been finding it hard to give myself space and time to process all that we witnessed. Feeling bombarded by family, friends, and professors with well-meaning questions about the trip and our experiences has been overwhelming. I keep coming back to the phrase “the more I learn, the less I understand”, which was a title of a book I saw in the book store at Birkenau. The more we learned and saw, the less I understand how all of this destruction could have happened. I found it difficult to come make sense of what the destruction of an entire group of people looks like, until we stood next to a pond filled with ashes. That is what destruction looks like.

Memorial next to pond at Auschwitz II-Birkenau

Throughout our time at various sites, there are memorials at very deliberate places. Whether in Auschwitz I, Auschwitz II- Birkenau or the ghetto and concentration camp, Plaszow, memorials were intentional, and I found them to be extremely impactful. While all of the camps serve as a memorial to the destruction, there were certain places that had special plaques. Places where human ashes were spread had memorials, as seen above. The plaque states, “To the memory of the men, women and children who fell victim to the Nazi genocide. Here lie their ashes. May their souls rest in peace.” There were several sets of these memorials in the area of the pond and by crematorium 4 and 5. They are in four different languages; English, Polish, Hebrew and Yiddish.

In class before traveling to Poland, we spoke about conceptualizing 6 million people. We spoke about different movements started by teachers to help educate others about the Holocaust and to help understand how devasting the scope of the Holocaust was. One of these projects was the paper clip project, where a school tried to collect 6 million paper clips to represent all the people murdered in the Holocaust. This was an attempt to not only conceptualize what 6 million people looks like, but to also understand that each of those paper clips represented an individual. Dr. Procario-Foley stressed in class to not only remember the individual, but to understand that each individual had a network of people that were affected. Each individual was a mother, a father, a daughter, a son.

A photo found in a suitcase hidden in Auschwitz II-Birkenau

If was difficult for me to come to terms with the scope of the murder until visiting Auschwitz II-Birkenau and Oswiecim. In Oswiecim, there is no longer a Jewish community. There is currently only one Synagogue, which is functional for groups that would like to use it but is also a museum. Seeing the site of destruction of the majority of a population and having that destruction mirrored in Oswiecim brought everything we learned together.

I found the ways in which different communities and places memorialized the ones they lost impactful. Some were more emotionally impactful, which others strived to draw attention to the individual; by remembered that reach person was a man, women or child, not a nameless prisoner.

Memorial at Plaszow Concentration Camp 

The memorial at the Plaszow Concentration Camp site to be beautiful. The crack in the statue is meant to be the broken heart of the Jewish people. It remembers those that were lost by visualizing the hurt and loss that this devastating event caused. Heart that was felt by every member of each community effected. A hurt and loss that brings me back to the question of how could groups effected by the Holocaust trust society again? These memorials not only remember those who were lost, but also serve as symbols of strength. The strength of a people who can come back from destruction to remember those that were lost while educating others on power of hate.