Last week, I looked out over the old city of Jerusalem, barely paying attention to the view it afforded me. This week, as I sit in a hotel in Lublin, Poland, looking out at the graves of hundreds upon hundreds of Jews, I swear I will never take that image for granted ever again.
When it was decided that I would be going to Poland this year, I didn’t really know what to feel–or what to expect. Although several of my friends have been on the March of the Living, they all told me that it was an experience that defies words. You have to go to understand, is what they told me. And today, as I stood in the gas chamber of Majdanek, I understand exactly what they meant.
When the bus first began slowing down, I was positive the driver had made a mistake. We were right off the main road, with several apartments and townhouses literally meters away. One look out the other window validated our driver and shocked me to the core. The camp is indeed right across the street. The chimney of the crematorium is visible for miles. There were people walking their dogs right next to it. The banality of evil began to take on a new meaning.
The feeling of disgust and horrror only grew as I walked through the camp, and reached its peak in the gas chamber. How can I describe it? You look up to see the showerheads, see the fingernail scratches on the walls. It doesn’t take much imagination to picture the sounds and the tears–for you are crying too. It is unreal, truly beyond comprehension that this is not the set of some horror movie, but that it is instead unbearably real.
I couldn’t help but wonder if those countless victims dreamt of retribution. I hope that they know, these nameless and faceless women and children, that the empire that tried so hard to annihilate them has fallen, while the nation they persecuted now has their own state; that their tormentors are surely rotting in the deepest level of hell while I, the descendant of survivors, am alive and well.
Surrounded by so much death and destruction, I felt almost obscenely alive, painfully aware of the blood running through my veins, the layers of muscle rippling underneath my skin, the warmth of the sun on my cheek. I felt guilty, unable to escape the thought that it was simply accident of birth, the luck of the draw, if you will, that I was born in this century instead of the last, in Toronto instead of Warsaw. But this is a pointless train of thought; it has no end. And so I wonder if my being alive isn’t retribution enough.
Reading this over, I am frustrated by the inadequacy of my words. Words aren’t enough. It takes more than words to describe that unsettling mixture of sorrow and victory, of unmitigated dread and an almost elated defiance that encompasses you in a concentration camp. Words aren’t enough, but they are also all we have. And so, if I leave you with only one thought, let it be this: You are not the same person walking into Majdanek as you are walking out.
Arielle Wasserman is currently studying at Midreshet Lindenbaum, one of Masa Israel’s 200 programs.
