Auschwitz I Tour

Submitted by Wayde Grinstead

“Remember only that I was innocent and, just like you, mortal on that day. I, too, had a face marked by rage, by pity and joy, quite simply, a human face!”

-        Benjamin Fondane, murdered at Auschwitz, 1944

They will be gone and the camp will be the only eyewitness remaining. This is how our guide ended our tour today, speaking about the decreasing numbers  of survivors of the Holocaust, and specifically of Auschwitz. This is a hard truth. 

As absurd as it may be to organize my thoughts on the troubling nature of what we saw today, the theme  of numbers sticks with me. Numbers can be impersonal, and too often our understanding of the vastness of the Holocaust revolves around statistics. (And perhaps it’s the safety of talking about an abstraction like numbers that allows me to process the experience of today.)

Our time this week  together started in Warsaw at the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, curated with the intent to emphasize not statistics and hatred and death, but rather rich lives and personal history. Today seemed to live in that intersection of numbers and personal story. These numbers, and stories, were visible in what was left behind.

Combs. Shoes. Eyeglasses. Piled high. Various shapes and sizes, suggesting the variety of people who they belonged to.

Suitcases. With names emblazoned across them. And marked with towns across a wide swath of Europe. 

Hair. So much hair. In ways, the most personal of what we saw, and yet, like the impact of the broader Nazi policies, stripped of their humanity and viewed as product.

And to think that the volume of these items, jarring in scope and emotional scale, only represent a minute fraction of the real numbers of devastation. 

I don’t want to see it. It’s too much. It’s too hard to see, to consider, to grapple with.

I have to see it. To confront it. To honor those individual lives lived. To bear witness, secondhand, to those multitudes of personal stories, not numbers, who are no longer here. 

These competing thoughts existed simultaneously for me. And I am deeply grateful I don’t have to contend with these ideas alone, supported by a wise and thoughtful group of Facing History colleagues. 

The sheer numbers were most literally and personally felt by me in looking at the Book of Names, which documents, to the broadest extent possible, the names, places of origin, and place of death, for the six-plus million who perished. The book, standing many feet high, filled most of the length of a room, and was in ways the most personal, as visitors could search for family and other loved ones, or perhaps just look at the vast range of names of those killed.  

 As devastating and challenging as it was to see those numbers, the volume and numbers of people visiting the museum were reassuring. To see the multitudes of buses in the parking lot, and to wait in lines with, see and acknowledge the faces and different ages of people  from  parts of the world, with their own personal stories, made me hopeful in an odd way in that, as we struggled with what we saw, we might move beyond this space and share what we saw with others. And while I can’t know how they are processing what they are seeing and what narratives they are taking away, I take some solace and comfort in knowing, or at least hoping,  that these multitudes, having seen both the immensity and personal nature of this place, will take what they saw back to their respective places, and bear witness to these stories. While the numbers of survivors may be diminishing, those of us who have seen this place can share what we saw, and honor the ‘human faces’ of the 6 million like Benjamin Fondane.