Imagine All the People

A rock that was on the ground near an original cattle car for Auschwitz that says, “Imagine all the people living a life of peace.”

When reflecting on my experiences in Auschwitz 1 and Auschwitz-Birkenau I can’t help but remember the people of all the lives lost during WWII. All of the people that the Nazis took to the concentration camps and killed who had been living normal lives. And in seconds their lives were turned upside down and taken from them for no reason other than the fact that they were Jewish. They were treated like animals, as if they weren’t even a human being at all by immediately being shoved into cattle cars by the hundreds and majority of the time being sent directly to the gas chambers and crematoria. Seeing how small these cattle cars actually were was really surprising to me even thought I had heard so much about what it was like to be in one of them with hundreds of people and no space to move or breathe.

The first day in Auschwitz, our guide Lidia spoke about how Jews from Greece were taken to Auschwitz on cattle cars which was a two-week drive and when they arrived nobody got off because either they had died during the trip or they had no strength in them to even move. It sickens me to think that the Nazis would just shove all these people into the cattle cars leading them to their death and that they would just lie to them and say that they needed to leave their homes for safety reasons and that when they arrived they would get a shower, which we know was the gas chambers.

The state in which innocent people were kept in the concentration camps was inhumane and I wish something would have been done about this sooner in order to prevent either less or no people dying at all. Even prior to being sent to the camps towns were barricaded into small areas called ghettos and the life in the ghetto was not much better than in the camps. SS Officers would parade the streets and just beat people for any reason that they wanted to. They could just go into your home and force you to leave all the while destroying it and taking your valuables. We learned a lot about what it was like living in the ghettos in Alexander Donats book, The Holocaust Kingdom. This book was really powerful and gave a lot of great detail of the events and pain that took place while trying to survive in the ghetto walls.

Imagine all the people who would still be alive today if it were not for WWII. What would Poland be like? How would the entire world have been different if this atrocity did not happen? I always think about what could have been if the Nazis did not kill 6 million Jews during the war and how things would have been so different if this did not happen. Would we have found the cure to cancer or other horrible diseases? Would we have world peace, would we have even had a second world war to begin with? These are the questions that sit in the back of my mind when I think about all the people that were killed or had to give up everything they had just to escape to freedom.

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Jews in Hiding

Hiding place in which Anne Frank and her family hid for 2 years before being found by the Nazis.

Today, I learned a lot from visiting the Netherlands Exhibit at Auschwitz 1 about how Jews hid and what they did in order to not get captured and brought to the camps. As you can see in photo 1, Jewish families in the Netherlands and many other places were able to build secret places in the homes and place of work. The most famous story of a Jewish family in hiding is that of Anne Frank and how she and her family were able to go two years living in that small space behind the bookshelf. This was a hard time for Jews because they had been hearing about what was going on and they knew what their fate would be if they were to be found by the Nazis, especially because they were hiding. According to the exhibit, Jews were summoned to Dutch labor camps and this led a lot of them to hide, but a lot of them did not because they did not have the connections or the means to do so. One fact that struck me was that from the estimated 140,000 Jews in the Netherlands, 40,000 of them were able to go into hiding, and only about one third of them were found and arrested. By 1942/1943 almost all of the Jews in the Netherlands had been found and sent either to the camps or arrested. The Nazis were able to accomplish this because they had Dutch citizens help them for a portion of money for every Jew they reported to them or told their hiding spots. I had not known how much of a difficult situation it was in the Netherlands for Jews there and the types of things that they had to do in order to survive even just two more years of their lives. When reflecting upon this story of Anne Frank’s family and many others hiding, I thought back to when Stan Ronell came to our class and spoke to us about how he had survived the Holocaust. Stan was able to leave Krakow and go to another place in the hopes of hiding and not being found by the Nazis after his father and uncle were caught and taken to Auschwitz where they unfortunately died. When Stan’s mother got a job working in a house in Krakow, the agreement was only for her but she would not leave Stan behind so he had to hide in the house for a long time. The only place for him to stay was in a small closet and since he was not supposed to be in the house in the first place he never really got to see the light of day. The only time he left the closet was very late at night, to a fire escape, when he knew that there was no chance of him being caught. He had told us to go into a closet if we felt so called to, to imagine what it would have been like to be in such a small space for a long time. After going through Auschwitz 1 and Auschwitz-Birkenau, and seeing the types of small spaces people were put in and the small rooms in which people him, I give these people that successfully hid and survived the war a lot of credit.

Photo of the Diary of Anne Frank available in the bookstore at Auschwitz 1. Anne Frank kept a diary of great detail about what it was like to live in hiding for two years.

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