Words Can't Express...But I'll Try...

I spoke with a Rabbi friend of mine and said of this trip, “I’m not sure that one says that they are going to ‘get to go’ to Auschwitz.” And yet, the next several entries here are a small view into what I saw and experienced as I walked the grounds of Auschwitz, the site of one of the largest known mass genocidal experiments in history, and the site at which the German SS branch systematically and ruthlessly eradicated the lives of over 1.4 million people. While over 11.4 million people presumably perished in the now used term “Holocaust” (9.6 million of them Jews), Auschwitz was among the most notorious, earliest to operate, and most “successful” in its mission. I honestly questioned whether or not to post anything about this horrific place at all, but chose to do so as I know you may not have the opportunity to come here yourself, and, as one philosopher put it, “those who do not know their history are destined to repeat it.”

My own reasons for visiting stem from a course I took at the University of Arkansas some 15 years ago now on literature by/for/about the Holocaust, and it changed me in a significant way. Every since, I have wanted to have some sort of “tactile” connection to the place, if only to give a nest for my nightmares to rest upon and provide some measure of contemplative “closure” to all the thoughts and feelings I have had about it for years now. Not to say that I expect to be able to forget it or “move on”, but simply that coming here will hopefully provide an element of completeness to an experience that in reality I am grateful to never have had, and yet in some way (infinitesimal by comparison to those who actually survived it) was very clearly marked by it.

I think that it was Ellie Wiesel (Holocaust survivor and writer of several books, most notable and popular of which is called Night) who said that in the face of such profound tragedy, the only truly valid response is silence. I honor that, and even though I share these words and images, wish to tell you that silence still pervades the camp. Birds don’t fly there much. People talk in hushed whispers. It is difficult to imagine it ever anything other than what it was now still less than a century ago.