As with everyone else on this trip, I was not prepared for the scope of these camps at an emotional level. I had been to Dachau and Buchenwald, I had read of the size of Auschwitz, the numbers of people murdered in extermination camps, the amount of goods plundered by the Nazis, etc.
It’s another matter entirely to feel on your heart what the mind is loathe to embrace.
As a youth I saw a pile of shoes in Buchenwald and felt sadness.
Last week I saw rivers of shoes in Majdanek and felt gut-punched as I slowly walked the length of the exhibit, up and down each row. Each step passed hundreds.
In Auschwitz I, and for this I am sorry, I took one step into a room with mountains of shoes and turned immediately back, the one time I have been unable to face an exhibit space, even after the Holocaust museum in DC, two concentration camps, and, just days before, two other extermination camps.
The weight of those shoes, literally and figuratively, will never leave me, and they are just one of the reasons that every living person on the planet needs to to walk that earth and see those things.