When we first walked into Auschwitz I, we entered a room full of headphones and walkman-like devices. I was in awe of how many sets of headphones lay on just one rack in front of me... But there were merely two, maybe three hundred - not even one percent of the prisoners whose lives were ended daily.
Gas canisters: Xyclon B used to exterminate in the gas chambers
Piles of human hair shaved as people entered the camps
Eye glasses collected as people entered Auschwitz
Pots and pans collected as people entered Auschwitz
Suitcases collected as people entered Auschwitz
Brushes collected as people entered Auschwitz
We each found moments of clarity - realizing the magnitude of the death, the humanity, and it just as easily could have been us. During a later discussion, a major topic was the newly-opened Jewish exhibit, Block 27, which proved challenging. We entered a dark room with videos of Jewish families worldwide living normal lives before the war. Activities such as laughing at Shabbat dinner, riding their bikes, and playing on the beach - they were just like us. A large choir of young Jewish children singing Hatikva illuminated all four walls. It then shifted to a wall of family photos. THE KLEIN FAMILY glowed at my eye level. My direct relatives all left Eastern Europe before WWII, but these faces staring back at me could easily have been my family. I have no idea who they were, how they lived, nor how they died. It's a daunting reality.
My next personal challenge occurred in the childrens' memorial upstairs. A famous Jewish artist traced drawings onto the walls in pencil, at a level that would have been at eye level of a young artist. I thought of my students in preschool and kindergarten art class and the drawings they create in my class weekly. They also draw planes, but bombs aren't falling from them. They also draw forests, but there aren't men with guns standing in them.
Drawings from children during the war
The breaking point happened when we entered a room with a rack of hanging papers containing records from European Jews. The entire collection is called The Book of Names. I began at the beginning of the alphabet searching for "Cohen," my mother's maiden name. I flipped and flipped, in awe and horror of how many names were listed. I jumped way ahead and landed on "Cohen, Esther." Pages of pages of women, almost all with "murdered" following. These women all shared my great grandmother's name. Dozens of pages of the surname Cohen, the high priests direct descendants of Moses's brother Aaron. Thousands of pages of names of millions of people are now nothing but names.
Today we walked out alive when so many others weren't so fortunate. We learned and shared stories of individuals to bring faces to the numbers, to revive the identities of those stripped of theirs. We are beginning to understand six million names and six million lives.
-Rachel Klein
