I thought of what he had told us only hours earlier.
I picked it up.
It smelled like roses.
The scent felt almost absurdly gentle after the day I had just lived. I stood there looking at this small, ordinary object and thinking about the elderly man outside the gates of Auschwitz.
I had never made a habit of taking soap from hotel rooms. I had stayed in hotels before and had never felt the slightest need to take one home.
But that night in Poland, I did.
The next morning, I packed it in my suitcase.
Later, perhaps because humor gave me somewhere to hide what I was really feeling,
I sometimes turned the story into a dark joke.
“You know,” I would tell friends, “I went to Poland. I visited Auschwitz. And I brought back a bar of soap.”
I would see the surprise on their faces and then add:
“Don’t worry. It’s from the hotel.
Rose-scented.”
Perhaps we laughed.
But I kept the soap.
Years passed.
I did not forget the visit, but I did not always know how to speak about it either. Sometimes the joke was easier than explaining what the object really carried for me. Some memories don’t fade. They simply remain somewhere inside us, difficult to reach directly.
Then one day, while looking for a Matryoshka doll I wanted to show my students, I opened
a box of souvenirs from old trips. It sat in
a small cabinet in the basement, untouched for years.
Before I saw the soap, I smelled it.
Roses.
The soap was hidden beneath a handful of refrigerator magnets, but somehow it announced itself first.
I held it in my hands, and something became clear.
Out of everything from that place, this was what I had taken with me.
Not the images.
Not the weight.
Not the questions.
Just this.
A small object that carried none of the horror—and yet, somehow, all of it.
There are things we cannot carry.
Not because we don’t want to.
But because they don’t fit inside us.
So we take something else.
Something small.
Something bearable.
A scent.
A fragment.
A way of saying: this much I can hold.
Maybe that’s how we survive certain moments—not by understanding them, but by stepping slightly away from them. By finding something small enough to hold without breaking.
The soap smelled like roses.
For years, I thought it was the only thing
I brought back.
Now I understand—
it was simply the only thing I could carry.
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