By: Meredith Warden
While learning about the Holocaust in many of the history classes I’ve taken over the years, I understood that millions of people were murdered. However, for me, it was difficult to actually conceptualize and fully process this massive amount of deaths. But, by being at Auschwitz, being at the site where those millions suffered and died, standing in the very spot where they were gassed to death and imagining the fear they must have felt as they realized what was happening, has allowed me to comprehend that every single person killed was an individual, with their own lives, hopes, and fears. It’s incredibly disquieting, and incomprehensible, in a way, to walk into a room filled with human hair, or a room with millions of shoes, of those who suffered and died here at Auschwitz. For me, the most moving part of this day, and of the entire trip, was one room in the museum. This room had home videos of Jews who, in a mere few months, would be dead. The videos kept looping, sounds overlapping, images on every wall so, wherever you turned, you saw and heard someone who would soon be dead. Seeing the happy people in the videos, I felt a deep sense of loss and sadness. Seeing the picture of a girl on the wall of the museum who looked like me, who was the same age I am now, and recognizing what she must have endured, was heartbreaking and incredibly emotional. There were at least five or six more walls like the one in the photo on the side, all of them filled with portraits.
Being at the actual physical site of Auschwitz, seeing these videos, hearing Howard’s rendition of what he went through, allowed me to cement my understanding of individual loss in the Holocaust. I believe that this recognition strengthens the power the Holocaust as a warning to us because, if we remember that every single human being killed in this atrocity was not just a number, they were a person just like we are, we can then carry this knowledge into how we understand and react to cruelty today.