A TAUCK TOUR TO HELL

I am Jewish, but not observant. I feel a deep kinship to Jews who have suffered religious persecution down through the ages and particularly to those who endured the Holocaust. 

My mother was born 75 miles north of Warsaw, but escaped the Russian pogroms when she was eight by riding with her mother in the back of a horse-drawn hay wagon (under the straw) to a North Sea port where they traveled in steerage for the difficult passage across the ocean. Her father had left earlier, and after having established himself in Brooklyn, sent money for Belle’s and Ida’s passage. I don’t know what members of the family may have stayed and what might have happened to them.

I’ve always wanted to put my feet on Polish soil and particularly to visit Auschwitz to pay tribute to those who suffered and died there. That’s why we signed up for a Tauck tour of Central and Eastern Europe, and a few months later wound up at the infamous gate to Auschwitz.

ARBIET MACHT FREI

(W O R K   B R I N G S  F R E E D O M)

As we passed through the entrance to the former Nazi concentration camp, and present day memorial and museum, I burst into tears. It was going to be a difficult afternoon. We split into two groups and a young woman, whose family had suffered at the hands of the Nazis, led our section into the camp (each of us clutching a white rose that we were given to lay wherever we wanted).
    We trudged through the villanous gate at the entrance to the camp and then from building to building. We listened in silence as our guide emotionally described the shocking sights that passed before our eyes: 

the wall where Jews were lined up and shot, 

the ovens, 

vast collections of eyeglasses, shoes, 
              utensils, human hair, 
           valises (bearing the names of the owners) 

and the buildings where Dr. Josef Mengele conducted his abominable experiments on adults and children.

We were shown the Commandant’s house where he lived with his wife and their children who amused themselves by playing outside on the killing grounds. He met his fate after the war ––– the stark gallows on the grounds of Auschwitz bearing silent testimony to his demise.

If going through Auschwitz was difficult, visiting Bierkenau was even more so. This nearby camp’s ovens cremated the gassed remains of hundreds of thousands of women, men and children. I was too tired, physically and emotionally, to walk to the outlying buildings. I’d seen captured Nazi films taken in these barracks showing skin and bones figures lying on triple–decker wooden beds and the sight haunted me.

I sat on the very railroad tracks that brought people into the camp some sixty odd years ago and tried to imagine what it might have been like to be herded into a box car, travelling for days without food or water, without knowing what lay ahead, and finally passing over these tracks to the unloading platform area a hundred yards ahead.

       I picked up a stone from the ground to take home and have it placed on my gravesite.