Tuesday, April 12, 1994 - Yom Hazikaron (night) - Ramada
Renaissance hotel, Jerusalem
I'm picking up here from Sunday... Towards the end, there was one building which held only shoes. The number of shoes was overwhelming. They were packed in metal grated holders. Going by slowly, I tried to fathom the fact that every shoe was a life, each one an individual with a story to tell. I reached out and touched one and tried to think about the person whose foot it once was on, and what his fate had been.
After finally leaving the room, I was ready for almost anything but what was in the next room. It was basically identical to the one I had just left. I had left the first room amazed at the number of shoes there, and now I saw that there were twice as many. Also in this room were some baby's shoes. The next room was full of more shoes, simply piled up several feet high. There was a wooden walkway over the shoes to get to the back of the room. This was so overwhelming that I felt like just falling into the shoes and going to sleep. Visually seeing all those shoes made the numbers somewhat more real, even though the number of shoes did not even approach half a million.
After walking a bit, we went into a gas chamber. These chambers were from earlier on in the war, when Carbon Monoxide was used, instead of Zyklon B. One seemingly minor detail that shows the sickness of the whole Nazi mentality is the fact that there were small glass windows on the door of the chamber so that the SS guards could watch as Jews were gassed. There was another building that had an exhibit on resistance.
The barracks at Majdanek were typical of those in the concentration camps, and were surrounded by a double electrified barbed wire fence, with another electrified section going diagonally in between the other two sections, so that no one could stand in the space in between the two fences. The most disturbing and frightening thing about Majdanek is that the city of Lublin was, and is, right there! The camp is literally in the center of a heavily populated area. Walking around inside the camp, we could see the skyline on all sides. Anyone with a balcony facing in the right direction could easily see exactly what was going on, never mind the smell of huge amounts of burning human flesh. There is really no way to deal with this on an intellectual level; it simply defies all rational explanation. Of course I had already learned days ago to put logic aside and try to accept the fact that what I was seeing actually did happen, hard as it may be to believe.
At another end of the camp was a tremendous monument. It was simply an enclosure filled with a hill, more than several times my own height, of human ashes. I spent a while just staring at the mound of black, trying to imagine how many people's lives were represented by this huge hill, seventeen tons worth of all that remained of the martyrs.
Near the monument, was another building, with a huge chimney. Inside were several different rooms, each with its own deadly purpose. One housed a large stone table where the gold fillings were removed from the mouths of the Jews. Another room was yet another gas chamber. There was a room that held a large glass box on display. Inside were intact human bones. Ironically, most of the people that were "processed" (to use the Nazi's own term) at Majdanek did not have even this much as their physical remains. The next room was a crematorium. There were nearly a dozen ovens set up in the center of the room, set up to dispose of those who had just been gassed. There was a washroom and shower for the SS officer right next door, so that while thousands of corpses were being brought in by the sonderkommandos and burnt, he was able to keep himself immaculately groomed. Many people just sat down and spent over an hour speechlessly staring at the ovens, crying, lost in thought and overcome by all they had recently seen. The building's huge chimney would have been rather obvious to anyone in the surrounding town, especially because of the fact that it spouted putrid-smelling black smoke around the clock.
On the grounds of Majdanek, there was another ceremony, this one
led by Flatbush. Finally, knowing that we had now been through
the most painful and draining part of the program, we boarded
the buses to return to a different hotel in Warsaw, after having
spent the last few nights in Krakow. After a long bus ride, we
finally arrived at the hotel. After spending a while getting our
bags up to our rooms, and (finally) eating, we had another bus
meeting. The discussion went on for a while, and we all had plenty
on our minds. Eventually, we split up for the night, our last
in Poland. We spent a while playing cards ("Egyptian Rat
Screw" soon became a bus 551 nightly tradition) and talking,
and finally, even got a little sleep.
[description of Monday, April 11, 1994]
We woke up Monday, more than ready to go to Israel and get out of Poland already, but we had a full day before we were to go to the airport. We had a great deal to see, but compared to what we had just seen, it was a pleasant experience. Our first stop was the Rappaport memorial, a large memorial to those who fell during the Warsaw ghetto uprising. The monument was an imposing one, in the middle of a square in town. It portrayed the fighters heroically, with optimistic faces. From the memorial, we walked to Mila 18, the last building held by the fighters of the Warsaw ghetto, now just a rock atop a small hill, left as a tribute and memorial to those who fell in the uprising. Next, we boarded the busses and went to the Umschlagplatz. This was the site where countless Jews were deported, most of them ultimately to their death.
Our next stop was the Jewish cemetery in Warsaw. The cemetery, usually a very somber place, was actually one of the least depressing places we'd been to so far - after all, those buried here died largely of natural causes, and many had long and fulfilling lives. The most powerful part of the cemetery was its sheer size. This was another one of the many things we saw that gave us a sense of just how tremendous the Jewish community had been, both in numbers and in culture.
Nevertheless, we were in a very lighthearted mood, and were joking around in the cemetery, with even our bus leader chiming in. It was another of those moments that made sense only in the context of the previous week - only after the March could laughing out loud while surrounded by tombstones make some sort of sense.
The cemetery was somewhat run down, and we made a bit of an effort to fix some of the more neglected graves. I even saw a pair of tombstones that had a name that could have been a differently transliterated version of my own - they read "Kaftal".
Next, we went back to the hotel in Warsaw for dinner, our last
in Poland. Myself and a few friends called school from the hotel
- it was great hearing voices we hadn't heard in a while. Finally,
we left for the airport, ecstatic to finally be getting out of
the country. We all hung out in the airport for a while, with
Matt and his guitar, spontaneously creating lyrics to songs to
celebrate our leaving "P-O-L-A-N-D" and finally being
on our way to Israel.
