So my son asked me why off all the cool places there are to go why would I want to go to Poland? We're not even Polish Mom ??
Specifically to visit Auschwitz.
That sounds a little nuts even to a history nerd like me. But for some reason beyond my control I yearn to go there. It nags at me. I think about it a lot. I have read countless books about it for many years. It's a pilgrimage that I need to get out of the way to get some peace; if that's even possible by going there.
Stephen Ambrose, one of my favorite history writers and tour creator, took me from D-Day to the Rhine and through the Origins of the Third Reich in the past few years. Fascinating trips. Life changing trips. Now his company is offering a Beginning and Ending of WW2 tour that of course will visit the epitome of Hell on Earth in a little Polish town called Oswiecim (Polish for Auschwitz) and end in Berlin. It's a lengthy tour and visits war museum after war museum and monuments to the brave resistance fighters, the Schindler factory and Stalag 3 (site of the Great Escape). Pretty sure there is no boating involved on this trip so I am going solo as it's not really Dave's thing. The cool thing for me on these history journeys is that all the other people on the tour are there because they want to be (except for the occasional spouse who went along to keep peace).
The historians on my past tours have been very skilled at bringing history to life. They describe events that happened right where you are standing and they make it personal by telling 80+ year old stories of real people. Unbelievable stories; but true.
I have tried to imagine thousands of times what it felt like to be in one of the cattle cars on the way to Hell. Not knowing, or maybe knowing, what would happen when the doors were flung open and selections were made. Would Dr. Mengele point me to the right or left? To die by starvation, slave labor and disease slowly or die instantly in the gas chambers ?
Visiting the concentration camp, Dachau, in Munich, was a somber experience. Thousands died there; mainly of disease, starvation or beatings. Though it wasn't an extermination camp. It was to detain political prisoners and if they died in the meantime, oh well.
Auschwitz was created specifically to kill people. A very efficient killing factory. Usually those chosen for the gas chambers died within an hour of arriving at the camp. Hitler's Final Solution went after Jews, Gypsies, Homosexuals, Jehovas, people who spoke out against the Fuehrer and others deemed undesirable and not worthy of life.
While working at a department store in high school I made a friend there that was Jewish. His name was Sandy. Quite the novelty for a coal miner's daughter from white bread West Virginia. His family had lost many relatives in the Holocaust. Since the public school system didn't really teach us much, if anything, about that I was stunned at things he told me. He was a young man working his way through law school at the time. His Mother and Father were very tortured by the loss of their relatives. Somehow they had made it safely to the USA before the war started. I went to their home for dinner once and they showed me the family album; pointing out many relatives that had perished in gas chambers or other violent deaths at the hands of the Nazis in small Polish villages. Being an unsophisticated, wide eyed, teenager at the time I'm not sure how I handled it when they wept over the pictures.
Sandy gave me a book to read entitled "The Painted Bird" by Jerzy Kosinski. It's the story of a young Jewish boy that was separated from his family and wanders around Poland during the Nazi occupation trying to survive among peasant villagers. Very dark and graphic. While it may be fiction, many think it was based in the author's own experiences as a child. It's a very difficult book to get through. It affected me like no book ever has. Still sticks with me. I read it again a few years ago and yeah, still powerful. I believe that it was made into a movie but I don't want to go there again.
So this trip is party because of that friend and that book.
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