Stepping foot onto the soil of Auschwitz is like walking through your history book
We studied photographs and maps of the camp. We had read memoirs and watched interviews of survivors. We read about Nazi guards who claimed to be “just following orders.” We read about Jewish doctors forced by SS doctors to assist them during experiments on other prisoners in order to save the lives of their families. Very little, if any, new factual information was going to be given to them at the camp; but of course, that wasn’t the point of going.
The technological age comes with many wonders which aid in creating ease in our daily lives. It comes with an unprecedented communicative ability which quite literally transcends distance, geography, and the physical world. But as we marvel at our technological conquests, there is a very real danger of man insinuating himself into a pseudo-existence, or at the very least a pseudo-experience to the point where he no longer feels the need for a real tactile relationship with the world. At Auschwitz my students were reintroduced to that tactile relationship by deeply connecting with this sacred place. The physicality of experience and the fact of “being there” made them a part of this story, with their duty being to work, all their lives, at creating a world in which hate can never prevail.
A few years after my first experience at Auschwitz, I asked one of my students what Auschwitz meant to her. She said that her time at the camp “transformed her” in a way she never would have thought possible: “I felt more for the people that I read about. I meant it more when I talked about the horrors of the Holocaust. And even now when I think about the day I spent there I feel…unsettled.”.
In order to prove a point, this student allowed me to give her a traditional test assessing what she had learned concerning the Holocaust during her high school career – it didn’t go well, she got 38%. She essentially forgot the material. She did not, however, forget the emotions of Auschwitz, the heaviness of the event, and the horrific reality of what man is willing to do to his fellow man.
9