Auschwitz: We must never forget

Courtney here. As a mother and sometimes very subjective writer, it has taken me a few days to digest what we saw and heard at Auschwitz-Birkenau a few days ago in Poland. Our friendly driver Dominik drove us the 1+ hour there in his van, through the idyllic countryside and villages while sharing his dream of going to Egypt someday and maybe the Grand Canyon. He has driven many a foreign visitor here and went here himself as most Poles do around 14-years of age.

Surrounded by barbed wire, Auschwitz looks like you might expect: a prison. And it was. Prior to WWII, this site was a base for the Polish Army camp for Polish prisoners of war. Hitler then took it over as a concentration camp for political prisoners before transforming it into a death camp namely for the extermination of Europes Jews, but also Gypsies, Catholics, homosexuals, the mentally ill and others he considered undesireable.

Oh, we've all read our history books and biographical accounts of course: "Night," "Book Thief," and Anna's latest, "The Diary of Anne Frank." But nothing, nothing prepared me and my family for the chilling accounts we heard on our 3-hour tour of these two death camps, including a walk through a gas chamber, viewing piles of old shoes and suitcases and hair from the victims, seeing the starvation cells and primitive sleeping areas (former horse stables) and standing on the train tracks where families were separated by Nazi doctors who in 15-20 seconds sealed their fate. If you were not deemed able-bodied to work in the German factories and labor camps nearby, off you unknowingly went to "the showers." This was nearly all women, children and older people. I think this idea of ripping families apart who had already been through so much in the ghettos and on the trains to what they thought was "resettlement" really hit home for us as a family. Even those selected to work lasted only a few weeks or months before they succumbed to starvation, disease, torture or outright execution.

In the end, at least 1.1 million innocent people -- probably more -- from all over Europe were systematically murdered here over just 4 years as part of what the Nazis deemed "The Final Solution." They called the warehouses where they stored all the discarded belongings of the victims "Canada" because at the time that was a country believed to be the land of plenty. If the officers or their families needed anything, they could just go to "Canada" and find it, living a comfy life at Auschwitz. This bothered Anna and it was also not lost on my perceptive 10-year-old that many of these victims were children. Like the rest of us, she soberly walked past the displays of little suitcases, tiny dresses and shoes and even the toys taken from children. Anna learned that some children with "German features" might have survived here due to their blonde hair and blue eyes. Some of these children were pulled out of the camps and sent to "Germanization Centers." For most, however, the only way out was "through the smoke from the chimneys in the crematoriums."

The atrocities these people suffered at the hands of a well-organized and fearful machine are hard to comprehend. As one message says here, "Nations who forget their own history are sentenced to live it again." I hope we don't. Hallie had a more positive summary of this experience simply saying, "it taught me how precious life was and to appreciate every moment."

With this in mind, we're all going to try...and remember while we do.