By: Brittany Pack
The “fun fact” I shared with my fellow travellers upon group introductions was that I am getting married in about a month – one month and a day from the day we get back, actually – and it’s definitely something I think/talk about quite a bit. When we had six hours to spend in Toronto, I spent some time looking into how to pack a wedding dress into a carry on suitcase. Delta has a section on its website about carrying special items (not wedding dresses, however), and one of the items listed was cremated remains. It said that in order to carry those remains, you must also present a certificate of death. It brought up in my memory a question that a student had asked when we covered Holocaust denial earlier this year. She asked why the stats on Jewish deaths varied so wildly among historians, and I had to explain that the Nazis only cared that they captured every Jew, treating (and tattooing) them as number, and not thinking of them in terms of names or identities. Entire families vanished from living memory, because the people who would have remembered them were also murdered. They often died in cruel anonymity with along with anyone who may have known, at the very least, their name.
This all came full circle (can this circle ever be full?) today.
After a rather chipper bus trip to Lublin from Warsaw, we found ourselves at the Grodzka Gate and NN Theatre Center. The institute here devotes themselves to remembering the Holocaust, but also bringing back the histories of the Jews who lived in Lublin before the Holocaust. They were also an exhibit, so much of their work was on display and definitely still in process. I was moved by the border of black and white photos
lining each room, the carefully-displayed
artifacts, and the depth of knowledge that our wonderful guide possessed. The work that mo
st moved me, however,was that which tried to recover the history of each individual Jew who lived in Lublin before the Nazis moved in. They had countless file folders lining these shelves in each room, and 80% of them were empty except for a sheet of paper willing to be filled: name, age, address, etc. of each individual Jew who had lived there. They attempt to return the identity of each one.
After this, we rode to Majdanek Camp, a killing center. The bus was again very lively, but fell silent as we approached. I won’t get into how strange it was to see modern Lublin creeping to the very edge of the barbed wire fences where so much torture and murder took place, but it is worth mentioning.
There was an incredible amount of history to witness there – the gas chambers, the barracks, the shoes, the furnaces. But there are two things that really stood out to me in terms of that moment in Toronto. First, there was a massive pit of ashes at the very end of our walk through the camp, which was mixed with dirt and clearly garbage, given the amount of broken glass in the pile. I immediately thought of the cremated remains on Delta’s planes, their death certificates to accompany the passenger, their loved ones knowing exactly what happened and when and where they ended up.
Second, there was a beautiful, dark, difficult memorial in one of the barracks. I included a picture because it’s hard to describe, but when you walk into this dark room with those lit balls of barbed wire hanging from the ceiling, there is someone reading prayers of different languages and different religions, paying homage to the many who perished there because of who they were and what they believed. This artist, too, attempts to return identity, or at least dignity, to the murdered prisoners here by dedicating it to the unknown victims.
Stalin once said, “One death is a tragedy, one million deaths is a statistic.” True remembrance is to realize that the Holocaust was made of individual tragedies, one after another after another. Though we may not have the simple dignity of a death certificate for each individual, we do have that knowledge, which is important to memorializing this tragedy. When we say “never again”, we mean it for each individual in this world.
The final thing that I want to say is that Holocaust denial is on the rise, which doesn’t just remove identity of victims, but re-identifies them all together. It calls innocent children conspirators, mothers liars, rabbis deceivers, survivors opportunists, and governments over-reactors. It says that the lost, unidentified victims have identity – liars. And that’s why I’m on this trip, because now I can tell people that I have seen the gas chambers and the Zyklon B cans. I have seen the shoes piled in cages. I have seen the ovens lined up, waiting to destroy the evidence that these people once existed. I have seen the ashes, and among them the fragments of bone, that attest to the fact that humans were there, they were murdered, and that this was systematic and carefully calculated hatred carried out to the extreme. I will not be quiet about what I have witnessed.
