Auschwitz.

I feel weird writing about this. But I feel weird not writing about it, either. An experience I had not anticipated gaining.

We took the train to Oswiecim, a town about an hour and a half from Krakow. Its a town, a real town. With bakeries and street signs and homes, people walking the street with their dogs, their children, their laundry. It is silent. It is cold and it is silent and it feels heavy so just walking of the train you know something grave and something horrific and something indescribable happened there. It feels like history left it behind, like a place struggling to breathe, grasping for a sign that life really does exist here, that it is not just a "tourist" destination. It was a tense and frigid walk to the camp. I didn't know what to expect or what to think so I didn't think. I just moved my feet as fast as I could to stay warm. Dressed in boots and jeans, a long-sleeved shirt, a heavy and thick sweater, and a coat. A scarf, a hat. Dressed for winter. (Victims didn't have half the clothing I had.) Freezing cold. When we arrived, there were tour groups everywhere. Long buses blocked the view. I grabbed a coffee from the more than ironic placement of the cafeteria and we, without payment, walked through the turnstiles.

We walked onto the loose white stones, moving under our feet, and with that first footstep out and in front of the camp, it was like a foot had kicked me in the stomach. As hard as you could imagine. I stared at the tracks, at "Arbeit Macht Frei," at the brick buildings, back at the sign. Robyn took my hand and we, both teary-eyed, proceeded.

So many tour groups. So many headphones. So many people just walking through like sheep. I didn't understand that. Robyn and I could barely hold it together. How did these people just walk from brick barrack to brick barrack, from exhibit to exhibit so easily? The first exhibit that really affected me was the infamous one that is a collection of victims' belongings. The barrack that now has graying hair, pots and pans, eyeglasses, prosthetic legs and more behind glass for us to look at, to see, to remember the livelihood of the Jewish people of Europe before they were forced into this death camp. Some of the hair was still braided (I had braided my own hair the night before). Pots and pans were piled, messy and chaotic (I have only just recently learned how to cook). The room of shoes, with a narrow walkway because most of it is taken up on the left, the right, and in front of you, with piles and piles and piles and piles of shoes. Red shoes, brown shoes, sandals, boots missing soles, multi-colored shoes, childrens' shoes (I had just seen hundreds of shoes lined up next to each other the previous day in stores, the contrast nearly made me puke). Suitcases piled on suitcases piled on suitcases. Labeled with family names as if these people would maintain possession of not only the suitcase, but its contents. I saw my own name, spelled a few different ways, four or five times. I cannot even begin to describe what that feels like. It makes you cough on the phlegm in the back of your throat, it makes you point and shrug as if its no big deal, its makes you want to scream for help. It makes you remember how close this genocide really is to my own life. My own name. Chana. Hanna. Hana. Chanah. My name is Hannah.

When I saw the tallit hung up behind glass it became clear that this was an attack, not just on people, but on a faith, a history, a heritage. My faith, my history, my heritage. And I started crying again. I sat down on the bench outside this room in the hallway, between lines of people walking at an even pace from room to room, and sobbed.

We saw the jail, the "courtroom," the place victims were forced to sleep. We saw exhibits on liberation and "martyrdom" of the Jews. We went to the death wall. I imagined it pooling and stained with blood. My ears rang with gunshots. Now its a memorial of flowers, candles, even some rosaries. And stones, so many stones. Robyn and I put some in the cracks ourselves.

But I couldn't believe the amount of people laughing there, talking loudly, even in the specific areas that demand silence like the "death wall." How do you find anything to laugh about in a place like this? It made it even harder to connect the events of the camp with the land itself today. Auschwitz was much smaller than I imagined and my brain just couldn't put all the stories I had both heard and read in this place.

We went to the crematorium. The "showers" are blocked off and mostly destroyed. But we saw the ovens. At this point I was so numb, so unable to process this history, that the Nazis could do this to people, this genocide, that my eyes could barely process the information in front of them (let alone my brain capable of understanding it). I saw the smokestack. And I know that I am missing a huge part of Auschwitz by not being able to smell the stench of burning human bodies that is integral to every survivor's story.

(We didn't go to Birkenau, which I now really regret, because we wanted to try and see the Leonardo da Vinci portrait in Krakow before the museum closed. We didn't get to see the portrait. Or Birkenau.)

And when we left Robyn turned to me and said "Look, two Jews freely leaving Auschwitz."