Poland Trip Midreshet Lindenbaum 2013

Auschwitz-Birkenau, Concentration Camp

Birkenau (Auschwitz II)

We marched along the tracks into the camp. In the distance, the watch tower loomed over our heads. We solemnly made our way under the archway and into the camp. I stared, numb. I just walked along the tracks that took my family into hell. I couldn't move, couldn't speak, couldn't breathe. I just stared. The vastness of the death factory overwhelmed me. We listened to testimonies of survivors. They couldn't find the words to describe how hellish this place was. I recognized quotes from "Night" by Elie Weisel immediately. Rav Brown told us the average life expectancy here was three months. My great grandma was here for over a year. I almost screamed. How did she do it?

We began our journey at the platform where Mengele, yimach shemo, preformed his infamous selections. I immediately thought of Tanta Freida, my great grandmother's sister. During her time in the camp she became ill with pneumonia, and she was recovering in the infirmary. One day Mengele came by her bed and requested her as a specimen for his experiment. A nurse had pity on her and said she was sick but would be better soon. Satisfying with waiting for his new toy, Mengele left. The nurse released her the day before Mengele was supposed to return for her, thereby saving her from and unimaginable fate. Snapping out of my reverie, I listened as Orly spoke about her grandfather's account of the separation. It was horrifying to stand there in front of a cattle car and think about at that exact place my family was ripped apart forever. It was the last time my great grandmother saw her parents and her youngest brother and countless other members of her family. They were ripped from her life, with no explanations, no goodbyes, nothing.

We marched down the path taken by the kedoshim who perished in the gas chambers. My great great grandparents and great great uncle among them. We sit before crematorium three. It is now in ruins, but that doesn't upset me. I thought I would be upset by the lack of preservation of the camp, like we the Jews were lacking the proof to validate our suffering. I thought my reaction would be the same sort of shock I felt when I realized that Treblinka was razed. But it wasn't. In that moment I just decided that no building used for such a cruel and organized form of death should be allowed to stand. I keep thinking of my great grandmothers brother. He was just four weeks old when he met his fate here. An infant who had barely had a chance to live was barbarously sent to die. I spoke of them and lit a candle in their memory. Grace then told her family's story and lit a yizkor candle in their memory as well. Suddenly I jumped. I heard a train coming down the tracks. My heart dropped, it was the sound of train arriving. It was as if that train was an echo of the cattle cars that arrived day after day bringing Jews to their deaths. At that moment, I felt that I was channeling the memories of my family when they arrived in this wretched place. I wept openly, for I was so unhinged by the sound of the train. I stood with the other three descendants of Holocaust survivors and somehow we held each other together. We had a bond that unities us: the mutual suffering of our families.

As we walked through the bathhouse, I felt as if my great grandmother was beside me explaining it all to me. The place she was forced to leave her clothes, where she showered, where her hair was cut off, and where she received her and prison uniform. My heart shattered in light of her inconceivable suffering. It was a horrifyingly surreal experience to know I was walking where the Nazis tried to take her identity away from her, to replace a name with a number. I wanted to scream to the Nazis, "Look at me! Don't you see? You failed! You tried to break my great grandmother but she would not bend! Look at me! I am the proof!"

There was also a rebellion in Birkenau. When the workers of crematorium four heard that the SS planned to kill them all, the underground took initiative. The women who worked with gunpowder smuggled it out of the factories to the members of the underground who hid it. The Sonderkommando (crematorium workers) used gunpowder to make hand grenades and revolted in October 1944. Although they failed, the crematorium was destroyed and they thereby succeeded in destroying one death machine. The Germans identified the gunpowder as their own and imprisoned four girls who were the suspected suppliers. They were tortured mercilessly and eventually hung, but the girls never gave up any names of members of the underground. They remained strong and true to their cause.

We then viewed the inside of the barracks. They were dank, cold, dirty, and the smell was awful, and that was without occupants. To believe that so many were shoved in and lived for so long is inconceivable. We also passed a barrack where the bodies of those who died in the night were collected each morning. The fact that such a thing exists is explanation enough.

We made our way to the women's camp, a special detour at my request. Lager A, bunk #5 lied in ruins. The only thing still standing were the chimneys. This was my great grandmothers barrack. I couldn't tell if I was disappointed or not. There are no words in any language to truly describe what I felt as I walked up to her barrack, but love and respect for her did gush through me. I was so proud to be standing there and tell over her story to my friends. I was her נקמה, her revenge against the Nazis. They tried to stamp her out, but she survived and had a family and her great granddaughter has returned to the place of her suffering to tell others about her life. The following is the speech I gave over by her barrack.

"My great grandmother, Gloria Grossman (born Yakobovicz), was born in Velky Rakovec, Czechoslovakia in June 1923. She was the second of six children. Her father was a shoemaker, but he primarily dealt with cattle trading. When the Germans invaded Czechoslovakia, her oldest brother was drafted to the army. At some point he became very weak on a march and he was having trouble marching. He wasn't going to make it. His friend didn't want to leave him but he knew that if they saw him helping his friend, they would kill him too. Grandma's brother was shot by his comrades in arms. My great grandmother knew my great grandfather, Martin Grossman, before the war. The two fell in love and wanted to be married. However, her parents didn't want them to wed because they knew that the Germans were coming for them. My great grandparents came up with an alternative plan: to flee to the mountains with some of Grandpa Martin's friends and hide. Again they refused. When my great grandmother told me this part of the story, she said in response to her parents' decision, "They were my parents what was I going to do? Of course I listened to them." She believes that they spoke with some sort of ruach hakodesh because almost all of Grandpa Martin's friends were discovered and killed in the mountains they thought would be their refuge. The Germans eventually came and put Grandma Gloria's family on a cattle car to Auschwitz. When they arrived, the Nazis immediately split the men and woman and then evaluated and separated. Life was to the right while death was to the left. Grandma Gloria was separated from her parents and youngest brothers and one sister. She never discovered the fate of her parents or youngest brother, but assumed they were gassed. She was alone with one sister, Elsie. The Nazis forced them to start walking. They didn't know where they were being taken. They arrived at the bathhouse where they were forced to remove all of their clothes and shower. Then the barbers came and shaved their heads. Especially among women, you can only imagine the pandemonium and chaos when all of your hair and clothes are removed. There was complete panic. Grandma Gloria then realized that Elsie wasn't next to her. She screamed for her sister. "Elsie! Elsie! Elsie!!" Suddenly, she heard a voice above the noise saying her name. She turned and saw Elsie. She was standing next to her the entire time, but they didn't recognize each other without their hair. They were then tattooed; their numbers are one after the other. They were then assigned to a barrack, this barrack, where they remained for their imprisonment in Auschwitz for a little over a year. In January 1945, the camp was liquidated due to the impending arrival of the Red Army. She and Elsie marched to Bergen-Belsen. Somewhere along the way, my grandmother developed typhus and could hardly stand. By some miracle Elsie was able to help her make it to the next camp. By that time the disease had seriously progressed and they assumed she would be dead. When the British arrived, they found Elsie crying on the ground next to a pile of bodies. They asked her why she was crying and she said that they assumed her sister was dead and put her with the corpses, but she was still alive and would they please help her. Grandma Gloria was taken to the hospital there where she recovered for six months. One day on the radio she heard that Martin Grossman was looking for her. She arranged through her doctors to meet him in Prague. Still very weak, she was put on a sleeper train to Prague she was reunited with my great grandfather. They stayed in Prague for ten days, and then returned home in September. Grandma was reunited with Elsie, and her other two siblings, Aaron and Freida. Grandma Gloria and Grandpa Martin were engaged that October and married on February 10th. Some people in the community played around with the idea of not being religious anymore but my great grandmother would here nothing of it. In 1948, they had my grandmother, Rose, and a year later acquired the proper papers from Grandpa Martin's family in America to join them. The small family of three and Aaron made their way to America where they rebuilt their lives. When I spoke to Grandma Gloria before my flight here I asked her, 'Grandma, if there's one thing you want me to take away from your story to pass on what should it be?' She answered that family is the most important thing and that I should always value family above all because at the end of the day, they're all you really have."

As I walked away from her barrack I felt a sense of accomplishment, like I had done my job. I had fulfilled my promise to myself to witness the remnants of the suffering that Grandma Gloria experienced and tell over her story to the next generation. I turned my back on my barrack, my Israeli flag on my shoulders fluttering in the cold wind, and marched away from the barrack. I didn't look back.

We then sat down under a guard tower and discussed the fate of the Hungarian Jews, children, and Gypsies, all of whom were under solitary confinement. We sang Hatikva, payed our final respects, and then silently made our way out of the camp.

Cattle car on the tracks to Auschwitz

Silent March to Auschwitz

Birkenau Watchtower in the distance

March on the tracks

The Watchtower

Birkenau

Separation Platform

Entrance to a field of barracks

Remnants of Crematorium 3

March to the Batthouse

Bathhouse

Entrance to Bathhouse

Room where prisoners removed their clothing

Where new prisoners' clothing was disinfected

Hallway to next part of initiation process

Area where hair was shaved off

Showers

Where prisoners received tattoos and new clothing. Picture collage in memory of those who lost their identities here.

Remains of Crematorium 4

March to Barracks

Inside a barrack

Toilet Barrack

Walk to Lager A

Ruins of Bunk 5

Hatikva under the guard tower

Leaving Birkenau

Auschwitz 1

Auschwitz I was originally a Polish military base taken over by Germany when they invaded. Therefore, it resembles a small town more than a concentration camp. The barracks are big brick buildings and the roads were lined with trees. The Germans surrounded be old base with barbed wire and reorganized it as prison for Polish political prisoners and Soviet prisoners of war. Soon after it became a concentration and extermination camp for Jews too.

The first thing we saw was the infamous "Arbeit Macht Frei" (work makes you free) looming over our heads. It's incredible to think how this slogan has become a symbolic representation of the camps. When I spoke to my great grandmother before my flight to Prague, she told me the sign's location (and she was right, of course; it was to the right of the crematorium) and then asked me if I knew what it meant. Now if my twelve years in the Jewish education system taught me anything, it definitely instructed me on how to translate these notorious words. But when she translated it, she did it differently than I had ever heard it. "Work frees you." One could just argue that English isn't her first language so it's expected that she wouldn't translate the classic way. However, I think there's something more to the way she worded it. It's not that work makes you free, so you can in a sense it's in your power to work so that you can free yourself. My great grandmother spoke with the voice of one who experience the hell of Auschwitz, saying that work will free you one way or another, in life or in death, but you had no control over it.

We went to visit the gas chamber, which was the first one operational in Auschwitz until the more productive ones in Birkenau were built. It was eerie to walk through the gas chamber. We saw the holes where Cyclone-B was dropped in and the resulting claw marks on the walls, left by prisoners as they were dying. Because the Cyclone-B emanated from rocks on the floor, the strong ones tried to climb to the top and in the process the marks were clawed into the walls. We also learned that Cyclone-B was developed before the war by a Jewish chemist. He developed it for disinfecting purposes and never thought that it would be used against his own people.

Next we toured the brick buildings. One of them in particular was the camp kommandat's house, another was an arms cache, and the rest were inmates' barracks. Most of the barracks had been converted into mini museums, each with a different theme. The first we visited explained the extermination process and how Jews were lied to until the very end. There were piles of suitcase, glasses, shoes, shoe polish, hairbrushes, clothing, etc. One truly haunting moment was when we walked into a room filled with piles of hair. Taken from the female prisoners, piles and piles of hair filled a glass case from floor to ceiling. Our guide told us that it was supposed to be shipped off to Germany to be used for numerous purposes. Hair. Human hair. Blonde, auburn, brown, black. For clothing and hairnets. For other human beings. I shuddered at the thought.

The second museum explained the life of the prisoners in the camp. Lined down a long corridor were pictures of inmates taken before the tattooing policy was established. Another room displayed sleeping arrangements. While some inmates slept on a straw-covered floor, others slept on bunks with bags of straw as mattresses. Our guide explained that the reason so many more men had survived than women is because women always chose to stay with their children. As a result, they were usually gassed either upon arrival or soon after.

Next we visited the infamous courtyard of punishment between blocks 10 and 11. Many were shot or flogged here as punishment for some sort of crime committed against the Reich. Prisoners awaiting execution were usually kept in the basement of block 11. Next door in block 10, many women were cruelly experimented on by German doctors, who wanted to test theories as to how to make women sterile.

We finished our tour at block 27, which gives a basic overview of the Holocaust as a whole. It included a powerful quote from a victim of Birkenau on the entranceway's wall, the nigun of "Ani Ma'amin" that was composed en route to Treblinka, recordings of Nazi propaganda, maps of deportation routes, and at the end a huge catalogue of all of the known victims of the Shoah (about four million). I found my family in those pages. Then to wrap up our trip Rav Brown gave over his mother's testimony and summed up our trip. Then, flag still around my shoulders, I made my way back to the bus for the final leg of this unbelievably emotional journey.

Auschwitz I