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Jeanne Zinser (Gottschalk)
Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, coinciding with the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. What follows is from my travel diary of 28 years ago, detailing a day that is seared into my memory.
A VISIT TO AUSCHWITZ JUNE 30, 1992
On this 15th day of our Eastern European trip, we proceeded to a destination that would not provide an enjoyable visit, but one that is most necessary and almost beyond description - Auschwitz. We’ve had a lifetime of information, literature, pictures, movies, TV productions, etc. about this infamous horrible place. We knew the details of the heinous deeds of the Nazis, but I don’t think that we were prepared for the enormity of Auschwitz. We’ve been to Dachau, which was painful enough. But Auschwitz makes the visitor endure a different kind of pain. It shocks each person into the reality of the unfathomable numbers of people who were totally obliterated. Graphic pictures of piled-up, emaciated bodies being bull-dozed into mass graves really don’t have the same effect as seeing the mountains of shoes, toothbrushes, hairbrushes and combs, shaving brushes, eyeglasses, suitcases, clothing, crutches, braces, wooden legs, and the TONS of hair! These are the things that remind us that these people LIVED, that they were more than just tattooed numbers, more than a horde of bodies crammed into cell blocks, more than just the flesh and bones incinerated in the ovens. And as one moves from exhibit to exhibit, there are faces everywhere - pictures of the victims in life, staring at all of us in uncountable numbers - a constant, haunting reminder that once they WERE here before they were so quickly erased from existence.
Traveling on to Auschwitz II-Birkenau, we encountered a different experience. Here, one IS consumed with the idea of DEATH. Perhaps this is caused by the virtual lack of tourists and the natural state in which all is allowed to remain. Over acres and acres stand abandoned wooden barracks, inhabited now only by bugs, birds, weeds, and ghosts. It takes little imagination to stand at those railroad tracks, which we’ve seen in too many horrific pictures and films, and almost HEAR the collective moan of suffering and inevitable extermination. The gas barracks and crematoria lay at the far end of these tracks of doom. The hot afternoon sun deterred us from venturing there - our choice NOT to go when million of others had no choice. A difficult day ended with our reinforced and renewed vow to NEVER FORGET.
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