Travel to Europe, Poland.

Auschwitz. Today was one of the hardest days of the trip. Coming into today, I had a feeling it was going to be a pretty tough day because this is the camp that I know the most about, but I was hoping that it would be touristy enough that it wouldn’t be too hard. I was wrong.

Today started off early with a three hour bus ride to the camp where we watched The Pianist. It was a good movie.

Even just pulling up to Auschwitz 1, I could tell that it was going to be a rough day. Auschwitz 1 has had many of the barracks turned into areas that show things found from the camp after its liberation and after the war. We had to wear headsets as we walked around in order to hear our guide because you are supposed to be quiet while in the camp out of respect. Walking around the camp, it had a gloomy, depressing feel to it. It was eerily quiet and you could sense that dreadful things had happened here. Walking into the camp, we walked under the Arbeit Macht Frei sign and down the path that the prisoners walked down every morning and every night on their way to and from work. I felt a small sense of guilt as I walked because I was there of my own free will, I knew my family was fine, and I knew I could leave in a few hours and most people that had walked that path before me did not have that same comfort.

The first barrack that we went into gave us the facts on the camp and the number of people that were killed there; I can’t even comprehend over 1,300,000. Seeing the pictures of the unloading’s that occurred and the models of the process to the gas chamber were unsettling. It is one thing to see the buildings, but to see recreations with people in them makes you visualize it and makes it so that you cannot distance yourself from it. Seeing the Cyclone B was not what I had expected. I had seen the canisters before and had figured that it came in gas form. It was weird to see that it was pellets that just reacted with the warmth. I think it was so weird because it reminded me of the poison that is used to kill rodents, which I guess is hoe the Nazis viewed the prisoners, but that just adds an unimaginable level to it. I don’t know that I could look at another human being as view them as nothing more than a little rodent.

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