There are ghosts at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The walls of ruined gas chambers could talk, and the murky barracks creaked with moans of despair. And we listened. By this point, we all know
the narrative. “In 1939 Hitler invaded Poland,” “The Holocaust was the mass slaughter of Jews, homosexuals, Roma-Sinti, Russian POWs, and other undesirables” etc. Especially for a group of students who find themselves knee deep in World War II studies for four or more months now, these things become desensitized fact.
There seems to be a gradient. When one is ignorant about a topic, they cannot care because they know nothing about it. When one starts to learn, one starts to care more. Eventually, the student reaches the point at which they discover that the more they learn, the more they realize they need to learn. When it comes to Holocaust studies, there is always more to learn, and more that will forever go unknown. Getting lost in this gruesome, fascinating, painful subject begins to make one numb to the horrors being presented, because you get used to and instinctively protect your psyche. This desensitization allows the student to dive deeper into the studies, but visiting sights like Auschwitz-Birkenau are a reminder of the importance of what we are studying.
My heart was heavy in the concentration camp. My body felt as though it weighed one thousand pounds and my palms could not stop sweating. I felt pain for my comrades who have personal connections to this most horrible display of human cruelty. Whenever I felt my skin truly crawl, as when we looked at the hair of thousands of victims, I reminded myself that at least I had an out, the victims did not. There is no greater way to forward one’s Holocaust education than by stepping on the exact path that someone else stepped to go directly to their death.
As I spoke of in my blog about Normandy, history is more than treaties and diplomacy. It is difficult to really get the humanity in history across in a classroom setting contextualized with exams and stuff classrooms. Of course, part of this discourse we are used to hearing is “the Holocaust was bad.” But do people know how bad? They can conceptualize it, but hearing the whispers of someone’s grandma in a gas chamber, someone’s mom in a women’s prison barrack, and someone’s son in the hands of Josef Megele, contextualizes it. The Holocaust is a cry against humanity, and forcing myself to put my ear right on the speaker reminded me the importance of why I study what I study, and why I have always made memorializing it an imperative.