I teach middle school ELA, and my literature textbook for 8th grade has a story in it entitled “Walking With Living Feet.” The story is about a high schooler visiting Majdanek with 5,000 other teens during her birthday week. The story goes on to explain how when standing in a gas chamber, the student could not feel anything and hated herself for it. She goes on to mention that when she visited Majdanek, there were five barracks filled with shoes, she noticed that hers was almost the same as many of the shoes she saw, and it is then that breaks down and cries.
I had a different experience today from the student mentioned above; I cried in the gas chamber and didn’t have as strong of a response to the shoes which kind of surprised me because I thought I had prepared myself for the experience. What struck me so deeply was a conversation I had with another mother. We could not imagine the horror a parent would be feeling inside that chamber with his or her or even someone else’s children. The instinct to protect and comfort, the fear, and everything else a parent must have felt in that situation, is a horror I can only begin to imagine.
Avi read us some hair raising entries from The Holocaust Kingdom. We walked through additional parts of Majdanek, and I thought the worst was over. The exhibit of everyday personal objects — a pipe, hairbrush, medicine bottles — gave me pause. These items are an attempt to make things normal in the most un-normal of circumstances. They represent hope, a desire to go on living as normal. There was nothing normal about this place, and there was no hope of anything being normal again.
This evening, Howard Chandler said you had to have luck to survive. I wonder if anybody who brought those personal items I mentioned had luck. I hope they did, but I don’t think so. I will take Howard’s words to heart tonight as I continue to reflect on everything I’ve learned over these last few days, and I’ll try not to dwell on the dark side of things. That’s what I’m saying in my head, but my heart is too heavy right now to get the message.