As many of you know, I recently visited Europe to complete a "Cornerstone" requirement for my college curriculum. The course was designed to focus on the Jewish Identity, both before and after the Holocaust. We visited the countries of Poland, Czech Republic and Germany; while staying in cities such as Warsaw, Krakow, Prague and Berlin.
It was interesting, from a cultural perspective, to engage in Jewish traditions and interact with surprisingly vibrant communities in countries where the wake of the Holocaust had decimated generations of the community.
While the course focused on the Jewish identity, looming over the course were the whispers of National Socialism. Having the opportunity to visit, and reflect, in sites such as Majdanek and Auschwitz, it is outrageous to think that in recent years there has been a regeneration of Nazism in Eastern Germany (and still open antisemitism in Poland).
I appreciated getting to have the experience of meeting with Jews who have continued to stay in these troubled areas, but the thing that struck me the most---and has still stuck with me---was the concept...the sheer concept, of the death camps we witnessed.
The photos I have on this post can not reflect to you how big...vastly, hugely, gigantic, insanely large these camps were. Purely for the dehumanization and ultimate murder of men, women and children.
I could only ask myself while walking around Majdanek and Auschwitz--Why?
For all of our advances in literature, philosophy, art and science--from the renaissance to the enlightenment, how could we as a species do this to one another? I'm certainly not one to be cheesy...but that was seriously in my head when looking at the sheer size of Auschwitz II. Why? Why put all that time and effort and money into building a camp that stretched on for what seemed to be miles? All that time, effort and money spent solely to centralize, divide, and kill.
A long stretch in Majdanek
Violence and war are nothing new to humanity, but the perfection of mass-murder of an ethnicity?
Making millions off of stolen property? Sending gas-victim's hair to corporations for use in their products?
Nothing made it more real for me then seeing a room...an entire room filled with human hair that was shaved off of murdered Jews. Human hair preserved for 70 years.
How about a room filled with children's shoes?
There is nothing right about that. Child-murder, by itself, is an inconceivable crime.
Sending these children, pregnant mothers, old men and women, handicaps, and anyone else deemed not fit to work off to an underground gas chamber to be crammed in with 1064 other people?
I'm not sure what I'm trying to say here with this post.
I was speechless at these camps.
I was even more shocked, and visibly inflamed to witness tourists from **forgive me student-activist-body for profiling** what we perceived to be members of an Arab nation posing and smiling in front of Nazi watch-towers and photos of murdered children.
That sentence obviously cannot convey the anger I have behind that statement.
The Majdanek Mausoleum's carving puts this into perspective: "Let our fate be a warning to you."
Anti-Israelites and Antisemitic bigots dream of the resources the Nazis utilized in their mass murders. Genocide still happens. Coordinated genocide with a monetary gain for multiple state agencies with the willpower to unite in order to commit the deed and provide a coordinated and efficient death-process is not seen in the modern world to the extent the Nazis took it.
And yet the thought is clearly still there; evident inside of Auschwitz today with that tourist group. It's evident in threats from Iran. Its evident from Holocaust-deniers inside our own country. It's evident in the recent shooting at the Jewish school in France.
That blind, pathetically stupid bigotry still exists.
And yet for all this grief---
The Jewish community continues to thrive within Europe.
