"A Cry of Despair and a Warning to Humanity"

How can the sky be blue here still?  And how can the sun still shine?  How can my stomach retain its food?  It's not sure it wants to:  it's knotted, clenched like a fist.

My feet are walking in the exact same places their feet walked, stumbled, fell, marched, terrorized.  This is not a movie set.  As disturbing as that place is, this is not the United State Holocaust Memorial Museum.  This place is the blood-soaked origin of the anathema.

I look at the exhibits, or I look at my feet.  I do not meet people's eyes, especially not the eyes of people I know.  I am ashamed to be human.

I see a display of children's items, and I realize that under different circumstances of birth my mother, born in 1941, could have been one of these children.  These piles of shoes could have contained the shoes of my grandparents, her young parents.

There is hallway lined with intake photos of prisoners that list the date they entered the camp, the date they died, and sometimes the date of their birth.  One man shares my birthday.  In 1942 his birthday present was a trip to camp. 

I see the standing cells, not big enough to lie down in, where prisoners were made to enter through little doors down at floor level, like animals.

It's cold outside, but it feels so much better to be outside than inside the buildings.  I'm not sure why.  Some things here are even beautiful, like the numbers on some of the buildings and some of the light fixtures.  How can this be? I don't know.

We get back on the bus, and the only appropriate response after being attacked by dementors is to eat chocolate.  So we do.  But it is only a brief reprieve.  We are driving only the short distance to Birkenau, the largest part of Auschwitz, what you think of when you hear that word - "Auschwitz".

We see the memorials, large and small, and I wish I could read Hebrew.  We see the ruins of two gas chambers and crematoriums.  I walk completely around one and wonder at how much death can be accomplished in such a small space.  I wonder if I am walking on the ashes of victims, and I think about my feet carrying them back out of this  place.

We go inside one of the remaining barracks.  I see a man, probably in his fifties, wiping away tears with the backs of his hands, like a little child.  This is not a momentary upswelling of emotion.  I see him more than once, and both times his emotion is on raw display.  Did he have a relative who was killed here? or who lived through this horror? more than one? Or maybe his relative was one of the SS guards?  Perhaps he is just a man whose soul has not been seared by the endless litany of man's inhumanity to man.

The sun still shines in Auschwitz.  It still casts its warmth.  Colors are still beautiful here, especially the ones on the inside of my eyelids.  Birds fly over this place as they would any other.  People even build homes nearby this place, as they would any other.  Is redemption possible for such a place?  Do I want it to be?