Poland, 2015
We’d arrived by bus an hour ago and watched the monstrous video. Footage of survivors; men who looked eighty, having been reduced to bone and cloth—yet the captions said they were thirty. It formed an uneasy introduction that I wasn’t ready for. My heart was already full, yet our tour of Auschwitz had just begun.
A woman called our attention to the back of the theater. She was in her sixties, wearing a no-nonsense brown dress and tight grey curls She could have been a librarian, though the subject of her study was narrower and far more grim. She introduced herself as our tour guide and asked that we follow her, single-file, out of the theater and into the daylight.
~
Our path began beneath the words “Work Will Set You Free” twisted in iron letters above the gate. I’d seen the phrase before, in textbooks and documentaries. It felt smaller in person—the letters thin and ordinary in a way that didn’t fit what it meant.
Almost a form of escape, the Photographer in me kept looking for angles and beauty. The sun filtering through the windows, the manicured lawns, and the painted wainscot of red geometric shapes scrawled over the years on the dirty cement walls.
As uncomfortable as I felt, I recognized this was not the time. Any beauty here came only from perspective and healing. Proof that life continues. I needed to keep this separate, so I put my camera aside, there was no escape here.
~
An hour later, we stared out the bus window in shock. Row upon heart-sinking row of barracks and miles of barbed and electrified fences passed us. The second camp, Birkenau was enormous.
Off the bus, Dani and I wandered the grounds alone, following a line of train tracks into the camp. The rails cut straight through the camp, refusing to turn. No breaks. Just distance, once measured in souls, now measured by our footsteps. Its original purpose all too clear.
To our sides, the camp reached outwards, with the jagged peaks of dilapidated barracks cascading across the swampy, flood-prone plains. Birkenau covered such ground that despite hundreds of other visitors, it felt desolate here. This second camp dwarfed its predecessor—both in capacity and in death.
There, at the end of the tracks we found our original guide, our tour, which we’d thought had concluded with the first camp continuing without us. She pointed out attentions to a sandy, ten-foot square of land. It looked innocuous, yet it held the ashes of a million prisoners. I couldn’t fathom its scale.
There, where life for so many had ended, and the tour reached its final breaking point, Dani reached for me. There we stood—not to comfort, but to bear witness. Then we turned from the ashes and began the long walk back to the gates in silence. The air felt heavy, but the steps beside mine kept rhythm.