Responsibility

On Wednesday, May 22nd, 2019, our group had the enormous responsibility of going to Auschwitz and Auschwitz II – Birkenau, the concentration and death camps where as many as 1.1 million people died, including over a million murdered Jewish men, women, and children. I say that this is a responsibility for us to go there, as the camp still stands as a testament to the worst of humanity, and we need to make sure that such a thing never happens again. As I went through the camp, however, I started to wonder if actually going to Auschwitz is the best way to do that. 

Upon arriving at Auschwitz, we milled about in a sea of tourists who had come as well, most of whom were students even younger than we, who were unfortunately not even acting their age in line. There were so many people there, in fact, that we needed a guide with a carefully timed tour of the camp to lead us, which theoretically prevented the throng of people from making the exhibits too crowded – after all, over two million people visit every year. Our tour guide, a graduate from the University of Wisconsin, led us briskly through the main camp. The exhibits, located within the former cell blocks that held the prisoners, felt more like queues that we needed to file through – our tour guide kept prompting us to keep up with him as we sped through the placards and photos commemorating those lost. 

The speed of the tour did not particularly bother me until we got to the first gas chamber and crematorium, which the Nazis used as a test site before unleashing them on an ever- larger, terrifying scale at Auschwitz II-Birkenau. I entered the dank, low-ceilinged building and instantaneously felt my soul leave my body. Every step that I took felt heavy as a hobbled my way past the holes where they dumped Zyklon B on the unsuspecting prisoners. I hugged my arms to my body as I made my way into the adjacent crematorium, and my jaw went slack as I stared into the claustrophobic ovens where the bodies burned. I had never imagined the ovens being so small, so personal; and then all of a sudden it was time to go. 

The one thing I did not expect about this experience was how, for lack of a better word, “touristy” it had become. The teens in line did not seem to think it any different from a museum; the tour guide was under orders to keep us on a tight schedule to accommodate the millions of visitors that this death site receives every year. Worryingly, I also counted two gift shops and a snack bar among the outside buildings. On the surface, this seems like it cannot possibly be conducive to broadening our perspectives on the Holocaust.

Yet without a doubt the moment where the brutality, the unimaginable horror, and the inhuman atrocities became real was when I stood where hundreds of others had stood in the crematorium. Rude teenagers and tight schedules cannot take that away. And because of that, I will take into the world an understanding that I have a responsibility to the world to do my part in preventing anything like this ever again. That is why the camp stands today—to make history unavoidably real and personal that to ignore it becomes impossible.

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