Commentary

I stood in the middle of the Auschwitz railroad tracks, the rusty metal chunks lowly clinking from the indifference of my hiking boots. I had just reached the end of the human dignity tour, a visitation to the various concentration camps in Germany and Poland. For an unknown reason, I felt as though I was experiencing something untapped. Not a vivid first-time envisioning countless years of what history books always told me, but I was involved in an emotional journey that seemed to be only similar to itself at the moment.

    I prepared myself for no allowed surprises. Before the excursion started, I read countless materials on the Holocaust and watched upwards of a dozen documentaries, seemingly merging my right and left brain together to form a barrier against the emotional strain and tension that relentlessly bridged it once I left the United States and entered into the tour. 

    This influx of disorientation and defeat to malaise eventually motivated me to send a desperate text to my friend saying, "I think this out of my abilities."

    My fingertips could arrange no words to express even an ounce of what the tour's sites unleashed on my usually exercised psyche. The drastic switch of emotions, a pang of incomprehensible guilt and discomfort fusion, and the looming idea that the designed outcome of my experience was my thoughtfully written pieces all created a continual mental purgatory that was unlike anything I had experienced before.

    Nonetheless, I have tried and will try to conceptualize and explain the aspects of the concentration and death camps such as Sachsenhausen, Ravensbrück, and Auschwitz, as well as other memorials to the murdered victims of Adolf Hitler's Darwinist ideology. The pieces, to me, seem elementary and one-dimensional compared to what I physically felt at the sites, even though careful consideration went into each word. There is no way to precisely explain the journey through those words, but an acceptance of the unknown can fill in the gaps.

 

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The Euthanasia Institution of Brandenburg an der Havel

 

My first jetlagged day in Germany disguised death in bustling cobblestone pathways and the colorful, touristy town of Brandenburg, avoiding anything to do with the muted and unsettling Euthanasia Institution of Brandenburg an der Havel, right in the middle of town.

   Merely hours before arriving at the memorial, on the site where the Nazis gassed some 9,000 people, I had finished traveling 13 hours on three connecting planes with an international flight cancelation, making the total trip from Wilmore, Ky. to eastern Europe a total of two full days.

   With the combination of a disoriented, hazy mental state and the ignorance of where the group was going (because the friends I had traveled with and I were thrown into the day's itinerary immediately upon arrival), I had no idea what to expect.

   In my research to strengthen my understanding of the Holocaust, I walked in knowing that euthanasia was first administered to disabled Germans who were thought useless to society – a piece of history that regrettably jumped into my head without any emotional response.

   It was not until my footsteps traced the Nazi's "Destruction of Life Unworthy of Life" program's victims that this historical fact became absolute and irrevocable.

   The tour guides led our group to the Brandenburg killing facility's gas chamber remnants. No longer than 50 feet in diameter, the same red and brown tinted bricks still outlined the murder that was a "secret" to the German public in 1940. How could so much death come from such a small space?

   When I started tearing up, I began to shrug it off as exhaustion and jetlag, my body forcing me to experience emotions from a first-time international travel, stress, and discomfort potpourri. I have a record in my journal upon arrival of a blunt scribble of blue ink yearning for an emotional response and a chance to somehow give the victims a deserving reaction. I couldn't come up with anything. I was numb.

   The center's tour guides told us the victims were usually gassed upon arrival. Men and women who, on the relativistic determination of German physicians, had the disability of Schizophrenia, Epilepsy, and "feeble-mindedness" were sent off for "proper care" and only returned to families in the form of ashes. The victims were stripped of worth and humanity, stripped naked to be gassed. More would come via a red-bus transport to nonexistence.

  My father works as a caretaker for individuals with disabilities, and the prominence of their value and consciousness is evident and undeniable.

  One man named Nathan loves collecting printed television logos. He will sit in front of his television set for hours, concentrating on a station logo that he has yet to add to his collection. My father says he has stacks of paper and can faultlessly identify each one. Another of his men, Darian, continually asks what I'm eating for dinner even though he has never met me and only occasionally hears about me from my father. There is precision and intentionality in the way that they interact with life around them.

   I have seen bright-smiled pictures and videos of the disabled men and women my father cares for. I have heard their laughter cut through the silence, resulting in irresistible joy for those around them. When I stood on the grounds where people like Nathan and Darian were gassed, I couldn't help but think of them. My exposure to Brandenburg no longer became a conscious

attempt to conjure emotions and translate them to paper, but an opening to a newfound chasm of hurt for individuals that I had never met other than in glimpses of their lives.

   Lastly, while sitting on the site and listening to the tour guides, I noticed a middle-aged man and his son briskly riding bikes across the public pathway adjacent to the gas chamber memorial and addressing the site as if it were simply another tourist attraction. Later, a couple approached the memorial's information sign, produced one indifferent eyebrow furrow, and continued to walk hand-in-hand into the picturesque distraction of Brandenburg's downtown area.

   I now understood that no one cared.

   And that is when I realized jetlag did not cause me to walk away from the Euthanasia Institution of Brandenburg an der Havel in tears.

 

 

Sachsenhausen and Ravensbrück concentration camps 

 

Leaving the conversational echoes of the group behind me, I traveled through the expansive and whitewashed textile room of what was once the Ravensbrück concentration camp. 

   As I stepped further into its hollowness, windows creating a dance between the sunlight and a much darker history, I slid my feet across the gray concrete and shifted my eyes to notice a small, dark speck differentiating from the monochromatic flooring. 

   I knelt to find a bumblebee, and I began indifferently picking at it with my finger. I wanted the poor insect to move but knew it wouldn't. Why was there a bee at a concentration camp? The camp's aura of humiliation, pain, and suffering flashed through my mind. Why was I searching for a sign of hope or life where one shouldn't be? 

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   The day prior, our team of students visited Sachsenhausen, a politically driven concentration camp for male enemies of the state, communists, homosexuals, and political activists and pacifists. The original barbed wire fencing still laced the camp as coal black, German lettering issuing a "Neutral zone, immediate shooting without call" statement stood as a cold punishment to those undeserving of one. 

   Located in Oranienburg, Germany, and adjacent to a vibrant residential neighborhood, we trekked to see this prison a handful of miles down streets with freshly manicured gardens, lively ice cream shops, and technicolor summer flowers in bloom. Dare I say the area seemed normal, even lovely. 

   Although there was a je ne sais quoi appeal to this route, our group was walking the exact course the prisoners took when forcefully admitted to this camp. I was tired, and with my feet aching and the desperate desire for icy water to chill my body down to my bones, I felt the individuals and their stories come to life again. Not through the miniscule amount of fatigue that I was currently facing but through a conscious acknowledgment of a time that could almost be forgotten if not careful. 

   I felt the same distorted sense of contentment on the walk to Ravensbrück, about three to four kilometers from the central train station. The hike, in the solitary moments of forgetting the destination, was colorized by late-morning light seeping through the tree's bright green. A friend turned to me and said, "This will sound terrible, but this doesn't seem so bad." I thought the same. 

   Sachsenhausen modeled the Ravensbrück concentration camp, the only camp designed exclusively for women. There, the Jewish community, along with German political prisoners, gypsies, and other individuals targeted by the Schutzstaffel, were worked to death and murdered. 

   Once inside the camp, the guide told our cohort that women were publicly stripped naked and shamed, instruments of medical experiments and examinations, beaten, and given laborious tasks such as making uniforms for all of the camps' prisoners in the textile building. A "not so bad" statement transitioned into remorse and a tinge of guilt for looking in adoration at the sights and nature leading up to not just Ravensbrück but Sachsenhausen as well. 

   The only intersection between the German camps of Sachsenhausen and Ravensbrück concentration camp was through prostitution. In many instances, women would be sent to Sachsenhausen to have sexual relations with male prisoners, resulting in sexually transmitted diseases, pregnancies, and forced abortions. Women who survived their pregnancies and were saved from abortions went through labor only to have the newborns murdered immediately after delivery. 

   It was disorienting to weigh the world's evil with the good, death, and continuation of life and hardship with the hope of relief. Quaint and picturesque towns craving normality and a new age against the horrific destruction of human dignity and a time when hope could not be attained. 

   I think humanity breathes through nature, and there are pieces of them left. Through the silenced buzz of the Ravensbrück bumblebees, the scenic walk to Sachsenhausen, and a feeling of complete exhaustion without even scratching the surface of what exhaustion means, one can feel life's continuation and the remembrance that seeps through the surrounding areas of Berlin. 

 

—

 

   I picked up the bumblebee and gently placed it in the palm of my hand, not attributing it to a sign of goodness or hope, but simply utilizing it as a reminder of the Jewish community, political prisoners, and the innocent lives suffocated from a convoluted and corrupt Nazi ideology. 

   I left the bumblebee on the warm cement flooring where I had initially found it, and until it's removed, there will be bumblebees at Ravensbrück concentration camp. 

 

 

Auschwitz death camp

 

A child would see his last tree while approaching the Auschwitz gas chambers.

    Whether he understood it or not, the child would not see the change of leaves according to different seasons, the weather-brought snowfall, and the first warm springtime day coming into being without him. He could not leave the guards' grasp to feel the surrounding nature one last time. There was no possibility of turning back from the echoey, sunless room that held upwards of 2,000 individuals to be suffocated and robbed of their lives.

    An hour. Once the Nazis perfected their method of killing in the final solution, it took an hour for Zyklon B to fully take effect and take the lives of each person sent to the chamber in the Auschwitz extermination camp. This hour consisted of the victims screaming, wailing, and trying desperately to save a life that was in no way able to be saved.

    While trekking the expanse of Auschwitz, I could not bring myself to believe that processing all of the death, the nonexistence of morality, and heartbreak would all be able to have taken place during that moment. Too many emotions flooded my mind to make sense of the tangible objects and evidence in front of me. My reactions numbed, and I felt nothing, a mental and emotional shutdown from overload.

    I still see a white-walled room filled with children's drawings at Auschwitz. Pencil sketches of men with rifles leading groups of families and three side-by-side stick figures with their necks craned from the gallows. How could a child even fathom the mentality to draw these murders?

    The Schutzstaffel guards utilized sacred Jewish prayer shawls as rags instead of being buried with the dead. Shower water was switched to scalding hot temperatures in an effort to break the prisoners mentally. Luggage was marked with names so that they could retrieve their belonging once "relocated," a humorous game of dramatic irony for the camp guards.

    It was not until leaving that I felt the buildup of emotions segue into copious recognizable feelings of despair, confusion, remorse, and guilt. What caused humanity to inflict mass genocide without any immediate repercussions? How were the millions of killings of a particular ethnic group societally possible? Are we capable, somehow, of doing this again?

    All of my introspection, societal evaluation, and remembrance of the past came through my embarkment on the human dignity tour and the visitation of Auschwitz. These problems will not be solved, and the past will never be altered, but there is presence and intentionality in honoring the victims of the Holocaust through that thought process.

    I remember glancing at a nearby tree close to Auschwitz's main gas chamber and could not help but believe the same tree that looked at me that day had firmly stood in the same area where millions of individuals experienced their last moments. So, how have I changed the future in a positive direction?

    Realistically, I haven't done anything except remember the past.

 

 

—

 

    In a diary entry I wrote before the trip on my writing concerns, I said, "To be transparent, I'm scared I'll stand in a place where millions of people were killed and feel nothing." I have now become aware that I was correct in what I feared, and I did, in fact, feel nothing, but an exceptionally different and more emotionally complex form of nothing apparent only in tragedies such as the Holocaust.

    Some concepts are more complex than the words we construct. I began to wrestle with this notion more once I returned to the mundanity of my life. Individuals with lively, curious eyes would ask how my trip went, to which I'd respond with a preconceived laudation while simultaneously, in the labyrinth of my answer, debating how I could avoid mentioning the Holocaust entirely. Any word that came out of my mouth was a disservice, and I began to be discouraged whenever I had to stitch together somehow a sentence that wouldn't even scratch the surface of doing it justice. 

    So, what happens when words fail us?

    After this experience, I realized that some things do not need to be explained. Some things only require us to truly feel them to make a difference.