Auschwitz

Today was the heaviest emotional and psychologically taxing day on the tour. Today we visited one of the most infamous places in the world, Auschwitz. I have already visited this place before but the gravity of the situation and place never lessens. Once you walk under the ominous black gate that reads work will make you free, the seriousness of the situation hits you like a ton of bricks. Visiting each of the barracks and seeing the evolution of the Nazi's final solution made me sick to my stomach the entire time. Each barracks got progressively more depressing and finally we reached the rooms full of hair, prosthetic legs, and shoes that was sickening how much there was in each room and how the Nazis would take these things from the Jews they were killing and then re purposed it and or handed it off to ethnic Germans during the wartime shortages. Our tour guide pointed out that the German Jews with prosthetic limbs that were the first people the Nazis killed were often former German soldiers that lost limbs fighting for Germany in World War I. There is no logic discrimination and racism. Finally, the last barracks that we visited at the A site was a new exhibit that I had not seen the last time I was there that showed the evolution of the Nazi's ideology and execution. The first room was a room that played home movies of Jewish communities through out Europe and the Mediterranean before the war. This was the most moving room because these people were just living their lives and being happy and celebrating weddings and holidays and they had no idea of what was to come. This room and the room with drawings inspired by Jewish children that were imprisoned at Auschwitz really related to everyone in the room and deeply moved me. These children were drawing executions and the selections process when children should be drawing knights and dragons and other fantasy things, generally innocent things. It just made me feel like they had their childhood robbed from them by the Nazis. I had never seen this exhibit and I dont think that I will ever be able to forget it.