Have you been here? I have a classmate at Brandeis who has. She’s originally from Bangladesh but now resides in the Netherlands. She’s not Jewish. She chose to visit Auschwitz-Birkenau after her high school history teacher sparked her curiosity in the famous exhibit of victims’ shoes in the Auschwitz museum. This summer, she had the opportunity to travel to Poland. So she went.
When I went to Poland as a high school senior on March of the Living in April and May of 2008 with approximately fifty of my classmates, the mission seemed to mostly focus on the statement we would make as part of a delegation of almost 12,000 Jews walking into the death camp. As the grandchild of four Holocaust survivors, I had to force my personal mission of understanding my roots. This proved somewhat difficult, as the March of the Living programming seemed to focus more on challenging the thousands of Jewish youth to accept upon themselves an entirely new mission of preventing any further genocide from occurring on planet Earth.
But what does it mean to plan a trip to Auschwitz-Birkenau fueled exclusively by your own curiosity? My classmate went independently, has no personal connection to Holocaust history, and was not embarking on a humanitarian mission for purposes of this trip. She went because she wanted to learn. She took her photos, collected her thoughts and returned to the Netherlands.
Her Facebook photo album description reads, “These pictures do not capture the tragedy of the concentration camps. One needs to physically visit the camps in order to comprehend what happened there. However, I hope these pictures provide you with the motivation to visit Auschwitz Birkenau so that we remember what should not be forgotten.â€
All I could do was thank her.
Media pay attention to Holocaust deniers. But what about the Holocaust survivors? They’re still here, still around. All four of my own grandparents, thank G-d, are alive, well, and in Brooklyn today. You can learn extraordinary things from Holocaust survivors, as I have from my grandparents. As a member of the third generation, I’ve learned to treasure my family above everything else because it very well could not have existed were it not for the endurance of my grandparents. I’ve learned to appreciate life, to get up and go places, to seek out a fine education, because life is transient and anyone’s could vanish in a day.
The human dimension of the Holocaust has become central to my own thinking over the years. I was utterly touched that my classmate chose to spend time immersing herself in the horrifying remnants of humanity’s most disgraceful moment in history. By doing so, she has become a witness, another person who can share the truth. It’s where my grandparents came from…where I came from.
“I hope these pictures provide you with the motivation to visit Auschwitz Birkenau so that we remember what should not be forgotten.†Words unexpected, but enormously powerful. And I concur: If you have the chance to go, don’t pass it up, regardless of whether you’re connected to the Holocaust. The camps are haunting but can touch a place inside everybody.
