People surrounded me, but a silence permeated the air. No original inhabitants in existence. It smelled of sweet autumn, but not of history. The skies were some of the bluest I've witnessed since I've been in Europe- an abrupt contradiction to my expectations. And the cobbled ground was hard on my feet, though nothing as I imagine it was in its early years.
Arbeit Macht Frei. Work Makes You Free. Or so they were told. Or so they believed- some all the way up until their final walk. I myself walked under these words, but no tears came. Just a heaviness.
We walk the halls of barracks. We walk the basement cells. I stand in the center of the Execution Courtyard. I scan the grounds from an old observation tower. I see the vastness of my confined surroundings. I walk through a still standing crematorium; I stand in the same spot that so many perished before me. But I walk out alive. I step back out into the sun, the blue sky blanketing me once again, and I am free.
Tears come only now as I write these words. They did not exist on the day I visited Auschwitz-Birkenau. All that existed that day was that heaviness. An indescribable realization that I could not possibly grasp the emotion and feelings of those who passed beneath those deceiving words over 60 years before me. I will never know the weight of their pain- it is unfathomable to any human who did not experience first-hand- though I naively and innocently came believing I somehow could. An important wake up call for all of us that day.
The sights. The sounds. The smells. The people- all has changed. The closest thing to any full understanding of what took place on those grounds seems to exist only in the falling leaves. At least in my mind, they told the story best that day.
photo credit: William Alquin Granberry
