Words are generally my most steadfast friends and come to me in even the most difficult and unimaginable of situations, but after Majdanek, though I feel so much, I find I have very little to say. No, that’s not quite correct; I do have a lot to say, but these thoughts in my head are not organized enough to form sentences or even words. I can’t describe them–they just are.
I do however have a series of sensual observations that currently swirl around my head like an extremely chaotic montage that I will attempt to describe. As I walked around Majdanek–a combined concentration, extermination, and labor camp–there was a light breeze in the air. It combed through the open water bottle in my hand and produced an airy whistle, which, if I performed whatever the audial equivalent of a squint is, seemed to me like the whispers of the ghosts that seem to haunt the place.
The second is slightly harder to express. As I walked around the camp, all I could think about in every situation in which a prisoner could be was my fourteen year old brother. Thank God and God-willing, my brother nor any other person that I know will ever experience that. But I pictured him there nonetheless. I broke down. Because in that moment, I had an important epiphany: the people who died in Holocaust were people’s brothers. People’s fathers. People’s mothers. People’s sisters. People’s parents. They weren’t just statistics and nameless Jews, nameless people. They were people with actual lives…and this of coarse means that those lives could be taken.
One thing that one of the teachers told me upon noticing that I was upset was this: nothing is permanent. The nightmare did end, as everything does. It seems simple enough, but walking around the camps–or negative situations in our day-to-day lives, it can be hard to remember that sometimes. But the teacher also said that were it not for the Polish people, non-Jews, by and large, Majdanek would never have survived seventy years. People are committed to remembering, and perhaps there is a glimmer of hope inherent there.