It had been another physically and emotionally exhausting morning. They all are. We spent the morning touring the absolute horror that was the Majdanek concentration and extermination camp.
By the time we reached the NN Theater in Lublin’s old town to hear the stories of what life was like pre-war for the Jews, I was fighting to stay focused. There is so much information, and we are standing for most of it; honestly, I found myself focusing more on the throbbing in my feet than on what Agga, our lovely tour guide, was saying.
Then a small photo album on display in the back of the room caught my attention and I wandered away from the group to examine it.
It was the story of young Heniek, a boy who lived with his family in Lublin before the war, told in photographs. Starting with a photo of his parents getting married, it moved through the years of his short life with smiling images of him as a baby and then a toddler in his parents’ arms, and then surrounded by parents, grandparents and other family for his 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th birthday celebrations. It ends abruptly with a photo of him on July 5, 1939, just months before he would have started school. His story ends there, as one of the thousands of children from Lublin who were brutally murdered in the Holocaust.
When I turned the final page, a wave of sadness overcame me and I couldn’t stop the tears from falling. Who would Heniek have become? What did the world miss out on by allowing such atrocities to happen? My mind wanders to horrible places thinking about what this child’s final days, hours, and moments were like.
I have often felt numb (with shock? disbelief?) the past few days hearing the sobering facts and trying to process the massive numbers: the number of people murdered, the number of people tortured, the number of perpetrators, the number of bystanders. Almost too numb to even process what I am taking in. But when I hear and see these individual, personal stories, I break.
I will never, ever forget the feeling I had of “knowing” Heniek briefly, and then having him abruptly torn from me. Heniek needs to be remembered. I will remember Heniek.