Berkley Center

This week has been a whirlwind of emotions. On Thursday, I hopped on a bus at midnight and seven hours later, arrived in Poland at Auschwitz and Birkenau, the largest and most well-known death camps of the Holocaust. One of the main reasons why I chose to study abroad in the Czech Republic was on account of its close proximity to Poland and my familial connections to Central Europe. My family is originally Polish, from Warsaw, and my grandparents owned a chocolate factory there until World War II when the Nazis seized it. Fearing for their lives due to their Jewish heritage, my grandparents were among the lucky few that made it out alive and migrated to the United States. Knowing this, I wanted to be near Poland to explore my Central European roots.

Sleep deprived and delirious from traveling, my group clambered off the bus and into Auschwitz. We entered the main gate, which read in German “work sets you free.” At first glance, the camp was surprisingly pleasant. The sun shone and the grass glowed. This surprising tranquility was quickly overshadowed by the exhibits inside of the wooden bunkers. 

What we saw needs to be seen in person. I’d heard about the Holocaust and seen pictures, but being at the camps was much different. In a book containing only a partial listing of the millions of people who died in the Holocaust, I found some names eerily similar to my Polish family name. I saw a room full of hair, all brown in color, very similar to my own dark chestnut locks. I saw baby-sized clothing and shoes that could fit in the palm of my hand, and I found myself wondering how someone could sentence such an innocent child to death. And finally, I stood in the gas chambers and saw the frantic etchings in the walls where the Jews had carved their names and Jewish stars in a last-ditch effort to be remembered (or maybe saved) from death.

Our tour guide remarked again and again how there was no method to survival during the Holocaust. Those who survived were lucky; there was no reason why some survived and others did not—no reason why my family made it to the United States in time and others did not. Our tour guide told us to look around at our own group. She said that no one out of our thirty-person group would have survived the gas chambers due to having either dark hair or dark eyes. No one fit Hitler’s ideal Aryan race. 

Next, we moved on the Birkenau. There was nothing pleasant there. It was stark, industrial, and in every way resembled the human killing factory that it was. It was efficiently planned out—the longer-term living quarters, the waiting areas, the gas chambers. People bounced from one area to another until they were gone. No bathrooms, showers, windows, or other necessities. It was atrocious.

When I got home from Poland, my father called me to talk about what I had seen. He told me that 14 of my family members had died in the Holocaust. And, while my immediate family had been lucky, my extended family had not avoided tragedy at the hands of Hitler. My family, forced from their home with no property to their name, was lucky. And the piles of dark hair, the clothing, the carvings on the walls of the gas chambers could possibly have belonged to my relatives. Maybe it wasn’t in the way that I had expected, but I found my family—and a small piece of my identity—in Poland.