History has a way of repeating itself. There is always a person or a group that abuses power, always a people’s revolution, always a religion that gets involved with politics, there’s always war, and there’s always peace. Every single country I have been to has elements of each of these, some more recent than others. All the museums and tours to date describe a time in the past that seemed out of reach until I saw Auschwitz and Hiroshima.
Auschwitz is a 5 hour drive outside of Prague across the Poland border. I booked a tour with Wittman Tours, a Jewish based organization in the Czech Republic. I was the only person on the tour along with my guide and our driver. It was a very rainy drive to Poland which sounds bad but it was really appropriate to see this place when it was dark, wet, and cold. There are two sites to visit, neighboring each other. The first site is the large death camp that at one time could house up to 90,000 victims. It was the site of multiple gas chambers, barracks and the infamous train tracks that brought people to their fate.
As far as you can see are the camps borders. It is enormous.
The Nazi’s on the brink of defeat, destroyed a large part of this camp to get rid of the evidence as best as possible. The gas chamber exteriors are demolished but since they were underground, you can still see the structure one floor below.
There are pits surrounding each gas chamber which hold the ashes of the deceased.
A scary thing about this entire operation was how efficient the Nazis were with the massacres. Coming off the train was a decision point and if one didn’t look healthy enough for laborious work, death was immediate although the victims were under false pretenses that they were to “bathe.” The gas chambers looked like houses with chimneys on the outside. In the first room, hooks with numbers were supplied in order to play along with the shower lie. Then the gas chamber was packed with people ready to shower in a room that had shower heads and drains, but of course what really happened once the door was locked and the lights were shut off was the poisonous crystals dropped from small holes in the ceiling that killed the entire room in a horrible manner in about 40 minutes. All together, 1.5 million innocent people were murdered at the time Auschwitz was in operation.
There are lots of stories, facts, and pictures throughout the camp. There are also memorials and statues to remind you to take moments of silence. I also saw tours of young Israeli teenagers who visit this site as a program prior to entering the military. One really touching room was a display of photos that prisoners, most likely from one of the last trains of people sent to the camp, were forced to abandon as they registered.
The whole thing is sad and depressing. There is tons more, but the whole blog is not supposed to be a repeat history lesson. It got quite real when I was walking through the second Auschwitz site where the museum is and you see piles of people’s belongings. Toothbrushes, combs, suitcases, belts, and shoes, things I have in my own bag. That was incredibly poignant, there was a connection there because these victims were just like me and you.
There was some hope that I was left with that day. While I was being showed the female barracks, I noticed a small gathering of people in the same barrack. Questions were being asked such as, “do you remember,” “where were you” etc. and I realized a survivor of Auschwitz was actually right there in front of me. She was there with her immediate family and she was trying to pinpoint the exact bunk in the barrack she slept in. She said she was close to one of the windows in the barrack because she remembered seeing her mother and sister some time after she had been at the camp, walking down the path to the chambers right out of the train. I was just amazed that there was a survivor right in front of me. My guide, who is also an independent film maker, caught quite a bit of this on film. She said she has never seen a survivor making their own personal journey before. They have served as guides and sometimes accompany the large groups of Israeli students but a survivor returning to Auschwitz on their own terms, is very rare. So it was a blessing for me to see this woman and get a glimpse of her past and know she survived this terrible place and has lived a new life since then. It was really incredible.
Hiroshima saw another side of this terrible war, and this felt even more personal, being that my country is responsible for the destruction that occurred here on August 6, 1945. Early in the morning, a U.S. B-29 dropped the worlds first atomic bomb. This instantly killed around 75,000 people and demolished the area in a 2km radius from the hypocenter. Within the next few months, 65,000 more died from the after effects such as radiation exposure and burns and countless more to this day suffer today from lasting effects.
I visited the very beautiful Peace Memorial Park on my first day in Hiroshima. The remnants of one of the original buildings very close to the hypocenter has been preserved and is a protected world site.
There is also a students memorial because many Japanese and Korean students were mobilized as a result of the war and were in this area when the atomic bomb dropped.
The part that was emotional was seeing the children’s monument which has a statue of Sadako Sashaki and a paper crane. This young girl acquired Leukemia after the bomb’s radiation effect and thought by the time she created 1,000 paper cranes she would have recovered. She passed before reaching that milestone and her classmates finished the task for her. To this day, schools from around the world have sent paper cranes to this site and they are displayed here. When I was there, a group of school kids were singing in front of the monument and it was beautiful and emotional.
The eternal peace flame which will not be extinguished until the last nuclear weapon on earth is destroyed.
The Memorial Hall is really well done. There are survivor testimonies you can read, listen to and watch. You see a 360 degree view of the destruction in a dimly lit hall. A beautiful tribute is a fountain that has the shape a clock face at 8:15am, when time stopped and the world changed.
It’s my opinion that it is crucial to see these places in person, to be reminded of the capacity of harm humans can inflict on one another. Being there doesn’t merely remind you of a history lesson you once had. Being in the presence, and there are so many examples and locations around the world, draws a personal connection in the hope that these events will never be forgotten- or repeated.
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