What I didn't Tell My Mother

For the 73rd anniversary of the liberation of the death camp Auschwitz – a recollection of my visit there in March of 2017.

It is mid-March. It is cold and rainy and crisp and the mud sticks to your boots. It gets in the tread, and even though you wear them another day on the cobblestones of Poland, the mud sticks to your boots. The guide tells you that the grass never grew back, and the mud stuck to their feet as well.

You don’t mention that before the mud, before the bus that took you there, was the tears. The as soon as you woke up that morning. The tears while you showered, and did your hair and attempted to put on makeup.

You tell her about the sign at the entrance. The one that makes your blood run cold. “Arbeit Macht Frei” The sign which is now a replica because people stole it, for whatever reason makes you want to have one of the strongest symbols of genocide.

You fly home two days later, and your mother asks you what it was like. You tell her about the room full of shoes and the room full of hair forcefully cut from the heads of millions of Jewish prisoners. But you don’t mention the way the concrete steps are worn up one side and down the other, from millions of people being forced to walk up and down them, or how your shoe doesn’t fit in the divot in the middle of the step, because it was made by bare feet.

You tell her of the vastness. Of how the chimneys – the only things still standing, seemed to stretch on forever to the right of the train tracks. (The chimneys of which are an irony, only there to follow German building code, not to provide an actual heat.)

Those train tracks don’t run right up the middle like the movies would have you believe either, three quarters of the camp is to the right of the tracks. Those tracks. The end of the line for almost 1.3 million people.

You talk of the rubble of the crematoria. The steps into the ground are still intact, the walls fallen around them. You don’t mention the anger you feel, when you are told that the SS bombed their own Kremas. The anger that comes from millions of people being killed as part of a “final solution” and the perpetrators attempting to cover their tracks.

You don’t tell your mother about the weight, that that place lays on your shoulders, and follows you back to your hotel. Your second scalding hot shower does little to lift it. Or how the watch on your wrist that belonged to your grandfather weighs heavier than when you woke that morning.

You waited to tell your mother all those things, but now it has been 73 years since these nightmares have ended, and almost a year since you walked where they did, and as Elie Wiesel said, “Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.” So now, in an age where anti-Semitism is rearing its ugly head again, we must remember the importance of speaking out, and making sure history does not repeat itself.

--H