From Majdanek, 3 days ago, overdue, but here it is finally.)
It is difficult to describe what I feel after seeing what I have just seen. Most of my emotions are such that I will probably never understand them. Yet for one brief moment, I felt that I truly understood what I was seeing.
The connection between the massive stone monument and the camp is formed by a narrow paswsageway enclosed on each side by a ten-foot-tall brick wall. As we walk through this passage, we are entrapped by both the walls and those walking behind us, such that all that is left is the view ahead, which consists of the few square feet of light that can directly be seen from the passageway. To walk through this passage is to be without choice, without escape, without any control over one’s own destiny. It is to have one’s fate determined by forces over which there is no control. It is to be without any knowledge save that another power greater than you will make your decisions for you, to have no more say in your fate than the bricks in the wall.
I felt for these bricks in that moment; they were simply part of a larger wall, each stripped of their individuality and of no more significance to a 2012 tourist than a victim walking through this same oppressive passageway seventy years ago would have been to the regime that controlled his fate. Walking through this passageway makes the visitor feel as insignificant and unable to choose as one of these victims, the bricks in the Nazi wall.
I used to see the Holocaust as a single incident, the murder of eleven million people. In that moment, however, I could see it as eleven million individual murders– just as a brick wall must be made of individual bricks, a genocide must consist of individual killings. Eleven million identuities had to have been stripped away and the lives to which they were attached deemed insignificant.
I am thankful that I emerged from that passageway as an individual.