“I’m hot.” “I’m tired.” “I’m standing on an ant hill and being swarmed.” These thoughts combined in an odd blend in my mind with the fact that I was standing on hallowed ground. Admittedly, as those thoughts crossed my mind, so did some measure of shame.
How many people in Treblinka or Majdanek or Auschwitz-Birkenau would have longed to think of such circumstances and know as I did that I was going to be in a comfortable hotel room at the end of the day?
As we walked where they walked, talked where they talked, we tried to understand what their circumstances were like. How did they keep their dignity in places designed to destroy it? How did they keep hope in places where so many had no hope? How did they keep their humanity in places designed to dehumanize?
As we walked where they walked, talked where they talked, we tried to understand how this could happen. The Holocaust. Systematic eradication. Mechanized murder. How did it come to pass that entire communities were erased from the map, not with bombs or natural disasters but with intentional deprivation, bullets, and gas chambers. How?
How do we honor these hallowed grounds? How do we remember the souls who passed through these camps and facilities of death? How can we keep it from happening again? That is the biggest question, isn’t it? How do we keep this from happening again? I wish I had something more profound to write than “we have to.” We have to be vigilant, we have to have empathy, we have to see the humanity in everyone.